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up vote 1 down vote favorite

I have run into a bit of a problem with my bash script. My script among other things is starting a server that takes some time to get going. In order to combat the long startup, I have put in a while loop that queries the server to see if its running yet.

while [ $running -eq 0 ]; do
echo "===" $response "===";
if [ "$response" == "" ] || [ "$response" == *"404 Not Found"* ]; then
    sleep 1;
    response=$(curl $ip:4502/libs/granite/core/content/login.html);
else
   running=1;
fi
done

When exiting the loop $response equals the "404" string. If thats the case, the thing should still be in the loop, shouldn't it? Seems my loop is exiting prematurely.

Joe

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2 Answers 2

up vote 4 down vote accepted

[ .. ] doesn't match by glob. Use [[ .. ]]:

if [ "$response" == "" ] || [[ "$response" == *"404 Not Found"* ]]; then
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Note that [[ ]] is a bash extension, so make sure the script starts with #!/bin/bash, not #!/bin/sh. There are ways to do an equivalent test in plain POSIX shell syntax, but they aren't nearly as clean. –  Gordon Davisson Jul 9 '13 at 0:13
    
Thank you for the answer, but even with your changes, I am still seeing the loop exiting while response has the 404 string in it. –  Joe Andolina Jul 9 '13 at 0:19
    
@JoeAndolina Just a thought - have you verified this with another site that definitely gives a 404? –  Preet Sangha Jul 9 '13 at 0:39
    
@Preet, My output in the loop is surrounded with === and my output after the loop is surrounded with +++, === <html><head><title> 404 Not Found </title>... ===, - after - +++ <html><head><title> 404 Not Found </title>... +++, –  Joe Andolina Jul 9 '13 at 0:41
    
@JoeAndolina Your echo statement destroyed whitespace, so if the text contained e.g. two spaces or a no-break space, it would print the same but not match. echo "$response" > file with quotes would let you investigate. –  that other guy Jul 9 '13 at 3:11
up vote 0 down vote

I am not sure why my original script was failing. I assume it has to do with the fact that I was comparing against HTML. To get my script working I wound up using the string length instead of the content. The using the following comparator has everything working swimmingly.

if [ -z "$response" ] || [ ${#response} -lt 100 ]; then

Thanks for the help, Joe

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