Timeouts in autoupdate scripts

[Julian Field]

There is a -T option to wget about which the man page says this:

        -T seconds
        --timeout=seconds
            Set the read timeout to seconds seconds.  Whenever a
            network read is issued, the file descriptor is checked
            for a timeout, which could otherwise leave a pending
            connection (uninterrupted read).  The default timeout
            is 900 seconds (fifteen minutes).  Setting timeout to
            0 will disable checking for timeouts.

            Please do not lower the default timeout value with
            this option unless you know what you are doing.

Anyone have any wise advice about the last sentence of that?

There is also

        -t number
        --tries=number
            Set number of retries to number.  Specify 0 or inf for
            infinite retrying.

These can both be put in the wgetrc file (location depends on your OS and
wget build) or in root's own ~/.wgetrc as
timeout =
tries =

These sound like they are just the options I need to add to a load of the
autoupdate scripts in order to stop them blocking when they run into
trouble fetching updates from vendors' web sites.

Anyone fancy trying these options and see if they help the autoupdate
scripts please?
--
Julian Field
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