Just a couple thoughts.

In general, I think retrying by count is often too simplistic
given that some error conditions happen more or less instantaneously
and others (such as a failing connect) can take minutes. A modest
number of retries will be quickly exhausted in the former case
while taking a long time in the later.

I like doing retries in terms of determining how long the operation
has to succeed. Keep trying until that limit is reached. It would
seem that the outer limit is already available in the form of the
-m/--max-time <seconds> parameter. The only other requirement then
is to keep from beating things up if one is experiencing quick
failures. A delay parameter is needed.

But after all that, this seems something that a shell could do easily
enough, assuming one has the ability to get the equivalent of time(0)
in shell. Nothing wrong with KISS.

Cheers!
Rich
Received on 2004-10-28