This is a simple go program that waits for a remote socket to become available. It's useful to avoid guessing when a service comes back up, etc...

Assuming you have a recent go compiler installed and working correctly, you can install waitforsocket with the following command:

go get github.com/dustin/waitforsocket

waitforsocket somehost:22 ; ssh somehost

You can wait for multiple hosts in a similar way:

waitforsocket somehost:22 otherhost:22

If you want to be fancy, you can look for a variety of hosts, and be satisfied when any one of them works (e.g. am I on the internet?):

waitforsocket -required=1 www.{yahoo,google,microsoft}.com:80

HTTP support is currently experimental (i.e. it's useful, but too easy to add a billion new options I didn't want to add, so it may not be perfect enough). You can supply a URL instead of a host:port in that case. e.g.:

waitforsocket http://www.{yahoo,google,microsoft}.com/

And it will wait until these all return HTTP responses indicating success.