Terminal Application to Keep Web Server Process Alive - bash

Question

Is there an app that can, given a command and options, execute for the lifetime of the process and ping a given URL indefinitely on a specific interval?
If not, could this be done on the terminal as a bash script? I'm almost positive it's doable through terminal, but am not fluent enough to whip it up within a few minutes.
Found this post that has a portion of the solution, minus the ping bits. ping runs on linux, indefinitely; until it's actively killed. How would I kill it from bash after say, two pings?

Answer 1

General Script
As others have suggested, use this in pseudo code:
execute command and save PID
while PID is active, ping and sleep
exit
This results in following script:
#!/bin/bash
# execute command, use '&' at the end to run in background
<command here> &
# store pid
pid=$!
while ps | awk '{ print $1 }' | grep $pid; do
ping <address here>
sleep <timeout here in seconds>
done
Note that the stuff inside <> should be replaces with actual stuff. Be it a command or an ip address.
Break from Loop
To answer your second question, that depends in the loop. In the loop above, simply track the loop count using a variable. To do that, add a ((count++)) inside the loop. And do this: [[ $count -eq 2 ]] && break. Now the loop will break when we're pinging for a second time.
Something like this:
...
while ...; do
...
((count++))
[[ $count -eq 2 ]] && break
done
ping twice
To ping only a few times, use the -c option:
ping -c <count here> <address here>
Example:
ping -c 2 www.google.com
Use man ping for more information.
Better practice
As hek2mgl noted in a comment below, the current solution may not suffice to solve the problem. While answering the question, the core problem will still persist. To aid to that problem, a cron job is suggested in which a simple wget or curl http request is sent periodically. This results in a fairly easy script containing but one line:
#!/bin/bash
curl <address here> > /dev/null 2>&1
This script can be added as a cron job. Leave a comment if you desire more information how to set such a scheduled job. Special thanks to hek2mgl for analyzing the problem and suggesting a sound solution.

Answer 2

Say you want to start a download with wget and while it is running, ping the url:
wget http://example.com/large_file.tgz & #put in background
pid=$!
while kill -s 0 $pid #test if process is running
do
ping -c 1 127.0.0.1 #ping your adress once
sleep 5 #and sleep for 5 seconds
done

Answer 3

A nice little generic utility for this is Daemonize. Its relevant options:
Usage: daemonize [OPTIONS] path [arg] ...
-c <dir> # Set daemon's working directory to <dir>.
-E var=value # Pass environment setting to daemon. May appear multiple times.
-p <pidfile> # Save PID to <pidfile>.
-u <user> # Run daemon as user <user>. Requires invocation as root.
-l <lockfile> # Single-instance checking using lockfile <lockfile>.
Here's an example of starting/killing in use: flickd
To get more sophisticated, you could turn your ping script into a systemd service, now standard on many recent Linuxes.