Eliminate Inner Loop - powershell

Question

i have two loops in my program.First loop for setting up the retry peocess and inner loop for testing a connection status.
for($retry=0;$retry<=3;$retry++)
{
while (!(Test-Connection "mycomputer"))
{
if (time exceed)
{
$status=$false
Write-Host "machine is offline"
break
}
}
if($status)
{
Write-Host "machine is online"
break
}
}
is there any way to eliminate the inner loop without changing the output

Answer 1

Not entirely sure what you mean by "time exceeded" - time to do what?
If you want to wait between Test-Connection attempts, you can introduce an artificial delay with Start-Sleep:
$Computer = "mycomputer"
$TimeoutSeconds = 5
for($retry=0; $retry -lt 3; $retry++)
{
if(Test-Connection -ComputerName $Computer -Count 1 -Quiet){
# Didn't work
Write-Host "Machine is offline"
# Let's wait a few seconds before retry
Start-Sleep -Seconds $TimeoutSeconds
} else {
Write-Host "Machine is online!"
break
}
}
The easiest way however, would be to use the Count and Delay parameters of Test-Connection:
$Status = Test-Connection -ComputerName $Computer -Count 3 -Delay $TimeoutSeconds

Answer 2

You don't have to use a loop as test-connection already have a count parameter

Answer 3

The other answers already go in depth about why you don't really need a loop but I wanted to add a solution to your refactoring question.
You can eliminate the inner loop and if statement by pre-initializing a $Result variable and changing it in your original loop if necessary.
Personally, I find this more readable (subjective) at the expense of an extra assignment up front.
$Result = "machine is online";
for($retry=0;$retry<=3;$retry++) {
while (!(Test-Connection "mycomputer"))
{
if (time exceed)
{
$Result = "machine is offline"
break
}
}
Write-Host $Result
Edit To test for multiple computers in parallel, I use following worflow
workflow Test-WFConnection {
param(
[string[]]$computers
)
foreach -parallel ($computer in $computers) {
Test-Connection -ComputerName $computer -Count 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
}
}
called as Test-WFConnection #("pc1", "pc2", ... , "pcn")
Not much of a difference when every computer is online but a world of difference when multiple computers are offline.