I demand that Patrick Gleichmann may or may not have written...
The current program exit-codes:
0 = Help, signal (e.g. kill -HUP) 1 = Emergency exit 2 = Error during initialization (commandline, config, device...)
At the moment I have a script, which sends a kill signal to leave the endless loop = end vdr. [...]
Make at least N attempts to start vdr and record the start time for each of the last N attempts. Once N attempts have been made, if the oldest of these is too recent, stop trying to restart it.
My runvdr does this (see .sig; you want vdr_1.3.44-2.diff.gz).
If you want to do this in shell then something like the following (untested) should be adequate:
#! /bin/ash
# ...
START_1= START_2= START_3= START_4= START_5=
while :; do START_1="$START_2" START_2="$START_3" START_3="$START_4" START_4="$START_5" START_5="`date +"%s"`"
# run vdr here
NOW="`date +"%s"`" test $(($NOW - $START_1)) -lt 60 && break done