I am regularly copying big files over the internet via rsync, and since I am travelling a lot, I don’t generally have access to stable internet connection, so I end-up rerunning the command multiple times until it succeeds.

Turns out there is a better way. Of course you could use while and test the return of the command, but that sounds like a lot of work for a ad hoc command. But I am lazy and I recently discovered that an until command exists!

Pretty straightforward to use:

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$ until <put your command here>; do echo "Retrying at `date -Iminutes`"; done

So with rsync you get:

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$ until rsync -aP src:/path/to/src dest/; do echo "Retrying at `date -Iminutes`"; done

And if you are really lazy, just create an alias (left as an exercise ;) ).