boolean type for while loop in bash?

Posted by user151841 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by user151841
Published on 2010-04-22T19:15:37Z Indexed on 2010/04/22 22:33 UTC
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I have a cron script on a shared web host that occasionally gets killed. I'd like to make a loop in bash that tries again if it gets killed, because most of the time it will make it. I'm having trouble with the syntax for storing a boolean value :P

#!/bin/bash
VAR=0;

while [ $VAR ]; do
    if nice -19 mysqldump -uuser -ppassword -h database.hostname.com --skip-opt --all --complete-insert --add-drop-table database_name > ~/file/system/path/filename.sql; then
        VAR=1;
    fi
done

So the script recovers from a killed process okay, but once it's run properly, the new VAR value doesn't kill the while loop.

What am I doing wrong?

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