repeat

This is a simple command I learned a while back. If you use zsh and want to run a command multiple times, you can simply use the repeat command.

I have a problem in my test suite currently, there are a few specs that will intermittently fail when I run the entire suite. This is a really big pain to investigate because it requires running the entire suite multiple times. Fortunately using the repeat command made it much easier. I done some work on the test suite to try and resolve the issues, then I simply fire up a shell and run:

  repeat 10 bundle exec rake

and then I go grab some more coffee! The test suite is fairly quick (about 2 minutes) so I can just let it run. After the suite has ran 10 times, if I don’t have any failures, I can feel fairly confident I’ve fixed the issue.

The repeat command takes a number as the first argument and then the rest of the command as the rest of the arguments. An example of running a single spec 200 times would be:

 repeat 200 rspec spec/models/idea_spec.rb:25

Repeat is a great tool to have in your chest anytime you want to do the same thing multiple times.

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