Comment by Twirrim

Comment by Twirrim 5 hours ago

9 replies

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I've biased towards this heavily in the last 8 or so years now.

I've yet to have anyone mistakenly modify anything when they need to pass --commit, when I've repeatedly had people repeatedly accidentally modify stuff because they forgot --dry-run.

IgorPartola 4 hours ago

I wouldn’t want most things to work this way:

    $ rm file.bin
    $ rm —-commit file.bin
    $ cat foo.txt > bar.txt
    $ cat foo.txt | tee —-write-for-real bar.txt
    $ cp balm.mp3 pow.mp3
    $ cp —-i-mean-it balm.mp3 pow.mp3
There is a time and a place for it but it should not be the majority of use cases.
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  • Darfk 4 hours ago

    Totally agree it shouldn't be for basic tools; but if I'm ever developing a script that performs any kind of logic before reaching out to a DB or vendor API and modifies 100k user records, creating a flag to just verify the sanity of the logic is a necessity.

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    • Joker_vD 4 hours ago

          if [ -n "$DRY_RUN" ] ; then
        alias rm='echo rm'
        alias cp='echo cp'
    fi
      Of course, output redirects will still overwrite the files, since the shell does it and IIRC this behaviour can't be changed.
      Reply View 2 replies
    • james_marks 4 hours ago

      Yep. First thing I do for this kind thing is make a preview=true flag so I don’t accidentally run destructive actions.

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  • digiown 4 hours ago

    For most of these local data manipulation type of commands, I'd rather just have them behave dangerously, and rely on filesystems snapshots to rollback when needed. With modern filesystems like zfs or btrfs, you can take a full snapshot every minute and keep it for a while to negate the damage done by almost all of these scripts. They double as a backup solution too.

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  • ronjakoi an hour ago

    I used to have alias rm='rm -i' for a few years to be careful, but I took it out once I realised that I had just begun adding -f all the time

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  • hdjrudni 4 hours ago

    Even in those basic examples, it probably would be useful. `cp` to a blank file? No problem. `cp` over an existing file? Yeah, I want to be warned.

    `rm` a single file? Fine. `rm /`? Maybe block that one.

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