bash’s ‘if’ command will executes its arguments and enters the clause if the exit code is non-zero. Usually we use “[“ which is the test built-in to accomplish

bash’s ‘if’ command will executes its arguments and enters the clause if the exit code is non-zero. Usually we use “[“ which is the test built-in to accomplish this (like “if [ $n -gt 5 ]”), which works the same way. But here the script uses “$@“, which is the rest of args “splat” in bash. The script passes those args to the “if” command which will thus execute “$@“ and enter the inner clause if that command returns non-zero. This is exactly what we want, since that inner clause is the retry logic. Just fun and weird bashism in the wild. (Sorry if there’s minor errors here, on a phone and going off of memory)