Comment by IgorPartola

Comment by 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.

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.
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- digiown 4 hours ago
  
  set -o noclobber
  
  Reply View | 1 reply
  
  3np 4 minutes ago
  
  Great, now we just need a --commit flag for tee
  DANGEROUS, AVOID:
  cat foo > bar
  SafeShell2038 recommends:
  cat too | tee --backup --commit bar
  
  Reply View | 0 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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