The Unix way, is that wget does the backoff. And wget is very, very good at retry, backoff, jitter handling, etc. Frankly, you'll not find anything better. I

The Unix way, is that wget does the backoff. And wget is very, very good at retry, backoff, jitter handling, etc. Frankly, you'll not find anything better. If wget fails, you don't retry... at least not until next run. And wget (or curl, or others) do reply with return codes which indicate what kind of error happened. You can also parse stderr. Of course you could programmatically handle backoff in bash too, but.. why? Wget is very good at that. Very good. === In terms of 'junior dev', a junior dev can't contribute to much without ramp up first. I think you mean here, 'ramp up on bash' and that's fair... but, the same can be said for any language you use. I've seen python code with no error checking, and a gross misunderstanding of what to code for, just as with bash. Yet like I said, I 100% agree there are issues in some cases. What you're saying is not entirely wrong. However, what you're looking for, I think, is not required much of the time, as wget + bash is "good enough" more often than you'd think. So I think our disagreement here is, how often your route is required.