I’ve come across a small annoyance with SSH when waiting for a server to boot. For instance, while starting a Karaf container, rebooting a Linux VM, or waiting for an AWS instance to come online, I don’t like having to continually retry to connect to the server. Instead, I’ve been using a small little Bash function for a while now to continually retry to connect to the server. What’s neat about how this works is that if you get disconnected, it will continue to retry. However, if you disconnect manually, it will stop retrying because SSH exits with a successful status when you disconnect properly. The following function can be used with any implementation of SSH, but I recommend using OpenSSH.