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bashapacheshellunixibmhttpserver

Use an extra condition within my while loop in shell script

We do frequent deployments using udeploy and we have there a shell script to restart the apache http server as the last task. Script is simple:-

cd bin_path
sudo ./apachectl -k stop
sleep 5
sudo ./apachectl start
while [ $? -ne 0 ]
do 
    sudo ./apachectl start
    sleep 1
done

Now i would like to include an extra condition in this while loop that checks for a certain value of the counter variable, so that attempt to restart the server is restricted to only say 5 times. Now here is what i want.

var = 0
sudo ./apachectl start
while [ $? -ne 0 -o $var lte 5 ]
do
    var = $((var+1))
    sudo ./apachectl start
    sleep 1
done

But somehow i'm not an expert in shell script syntax. If someone can help me correct the script to achieve the desired solution.

Solution

  • You have several problems.

    1. Shell variable assignments have no spaces around =.
    2. Your while loop is testing the status of sleep, not sudo.
    3. You're using or when you should be using and to combine the conditions.
    4. Comparisons in test need a - prefix.

    The correct script should be:

    var=0
while ! sudo ./apachectl start && [ $var -le 5 ]
do
    var=$((var+1))
    sleep 1
done