Simple shell script to ping every couple of minutes?

[hypersire]

Hi all - I keep getting kicked off my remote desktop connection (due to inactivity) so I am trying to write a little shell script that will simply ping the remote computer every 2 minutes.

ping -c 4 ipaddress
sleep 120

repeat

What code could I use to repeat the ping every 2 minutes?

Thanks!

[Ayman]

This is an infinite loop in Bash:
while [ 1 ]; do
# Commands here.
done

[hypersire]

Thanks very much Ayman!

[bashologist]

A few other ways of doing an infinite loop:

for ((;;)) do
echo "enter commands here"
sleep 120
done

while true; do
echo "enter commands here"
sleep 120
done

[DeadEyes]

what about a simply using the interval switch
ping -i120 ipaddress

[hypersire]

what about a simply using the interval switch
ping -i120 ipaddress

Even better! I didn't know about the ping interval switch! Thanks!

The only benefit to using the shell script with a loop and and the count flag is that the ping operation completes each iteration, showing you the full stats. With the -i method you won't see the full stats till you end the operation. I don't care about the stats so I am using the ping -i method.

And it works great - my remote desktop connection no longer kicks me off! I just ping the server every 5 minutes.

[bLUEbYTE]

Cron it.