Send an email if a URL is down twice only

We want to check if a URL is down or not. But sometimes, the environment is down for maintenance for 3-4 hours and we don't want to keep sending emails during that time.

I have written a shell script for performing a URL check and running it every 30 mins using a cronjob.

The actual requirements are:

• Check if the URL is up. If it is down, send an email.

• Cronjob will execute the script again. If Step 1 sent an email, then send an email again asking if the environment is under maintenance.

• Cronjob will execute the script again. If it is still down, don't do anything.

• Keep checking the URL, and if it is responding, don't do anything. But if it goes down again, follow step 1-3.

The script works. Could you please review and suggest if there is a nicer way of writing the script? I'm learning shell script but don't know all the available options.

``
#!/bin/bash
#Checking urls from urls.txt
MAddr="jsing002@internalsvcs.pte.com"
TIME=date +%d-%m-%Y_%H.%M.%S
SCRIPT_LOC=/user/inf/ete4/eteabp4/eid_scripts/jsing002
for url in awk '{print $1}' $SCRIPT_LOC/urls.txt
do
/usr/bin/wget -t 0 --spider --no-check-certificate $url > wget.output 2>&1
HTTPCode=(/usr/bin/wget -t 0 --spider --no-check-certificate $url) 2>&1 | grep HTTP| tail -1|cut -c 41-43
ENV=(grep $url $SCRIPT_LOC/urls.txt | awk '{print $2}')
echo $HTTPCode
E1=/bin/grep -ise 'refused' -ise 'failed' wget.output`
if [ "$E1" != "" ] || [ $HTTPCode -ge 500 ]
then
status="DOWN"
echo "Step 1"
echo "${ENV}""_DOWN"

if [ -f "${ENV}""_DOWN" ];
then
echo "step 2"
echo "Please check if $ENV in Maintanance window.The check for $url has failed twice.Next The next failure email will be sent if preceding test was SUCCESSFUL" | /bin/mail -s "Is $ENV in Maintanance Window ?" $MAddr

• Quoting: Be in the habit of always double-quoting your variables when you use them, e.g. "$url" instead of $url. Otherwise, nasty vulnerabilities could happen if a variable's value contains spaces or shell metacharacters. URLs, especially, often contain special characters such as & and ?.

-
Structure: When processing input with multiple columns, one row at a time, the idiom to use is…

while read url env ; do
    # Do stuff here
done < "$SCRIPT_LOC/urls.txt"

If the columns are delimited by something other than whitespace…

while IFS=: read user pwhash uid gid gecos homedir shell ; do
    # Do stuff here
done < /etc/passwd

-
Status of wget: You run wget twice for each URL. Instead of trying to get the HTTP status code, consider using just the exit status of wget to indicate success or failure.

if wget -q -t 0 --spider --no-check-certificate "$url" ; then
    # Handle success
else
    # Handle failure
fi

I've used the --quiet flag here. Also, I think that an infinite timeout (-t 0) is a bad idea.

• HTTP status interpretation: HTTP status codes other than 200 (e.g. 2xx or 3xx) could also indicate some kind of success.

• Filesystem littering: You litter the current directory with temporary files wget.output and "${ENV}_DOWN" and "${ENV}_DOWN_2". Perhaps you could append all the state to a single log file.

• SCRIPT_LOC could probably be computed using $(dirname $0).

StackExchange Code Review Q#33742, answer score: 2