Retry

A utility for retrying failed CLI commands on Unix-like systems.

See the latest release for supported platforms.

Features

• Configurable delay before retrying with human readable units (e.g. 1s, 20ms, 3m etc.)
• Exponential back-off with the -m|--delay-multiplier option
• Proxies stop signals to the child command (SIGHUP, SIGINT, SIGQUIT, SIGTERM)

Usage

USAGE:
    retry [OPTIONS] [--] <COMMAND>...

ARGS:
    <COMMAND>...    The command to run

OPTIONS:
    -a, --attempts <ATTEMPTS>
            The total number of attempts [default: 5]

    -d, --delay <DELAY>
            How long to wait before each retry [default: 1s]

    -m, --delay-multiplier <DELAY_MULTIPLIER>
            Multiply the delay after each failed attempt [default: 1]

    -q, --quiet
            Suppress output when the wrapped command fails

    -h, --help
            Print help information

    -V, --version
            Print version information

Examples

# Default 1 second delay before retrying, total of 5 attempts
➜ retry -- /path/to/mission-critical-script.sh

# No delay before retrying, total of 3 attempts
➜ retry --delay 0s --attempts 3 -- ssh user@some.host some-remote-task

# Exponential backoff: 10ms, 20ms, 40ms, 80ms, etc. before successive retries
➜ retry --delay 10ms --delay-multiplier 2 -- /bin/sh -c "echo 'important work'"

Output

All output from the child command is piped to the stdout/stderr streams of retry-cli. If the child command exits with a non-zero code then a summary of each failed invocation is printed to stderr (unless the -q|--quiet option is provided).

➜ retry -d 10ms -m 2 -- false

command `false` exited with non-zero code (1) on attempt #1; retrying in 10ms
command `false` exited with non-zero code (1) on attempt #2; retrying in 20ms
command `false` exited with non-zero code (1) on attempt #3; retrying in 40ms
command `false` exited with non-zero code (1) on attempt #4; retrying in 80ms
command `false` exited with non-zero code (1) on attempt #5; maximum attempts reached

➜ echo $?

1

The exit code of retry-cli will always match the last exit code of the child command.