safe

It asks you again whatever it is in your mind, just in case.

Usage

$ safe [shell command and its arguments]

Examples

$ safe rm /var/log/backup*
> rm backups backups_old
Are you sure? y|n

Tip: notice that it replaces * with what SHELL interprets it as. In this case backup* --> backups backups_old

$ safe dd if=/path/to/old/image of=/dev/sda
> dd if=/path/to/old/image of=/dev/sda
Are you sure? y|n

Use cases

Interactive shell

Let's say you have a backup script that deletes the old directory before backing up:

rm -rf $HOME/backups

If you run this script normally it will delete the directory without asking any question:

$ ./run-backup.sh
backup start...
done.

This is great for running the script as a cron job or any automated process. But when you run it manually you want to be warned.

You install safe and add an alias in your .bashrc to make rm safe:

$ alias rm='safe rm'

Now, you can run the script again but this time you will be warned first:

$ bash -i ./run-backup.sh
backup start...
> rm -rf /home/user/backups
Are you sure? y|n

Parameter expansion

All parameters passed to safe are expanded. In other words, paths containing wildcards will be expanded to a list of correspanding files and directories. This is particularly helpfule when safe used with rm.

$ alias rm='safe rm'

When deleting the test images you may notice a test audio which was not intended to be deleted.

$ rm test*
> rm test test_000.png test_001.png test-0.png test-1.png testaudio.mp3
Are you sure? y|n n
Ok, moving on. They say, better to be safe than sorry.
$ rm test*png
> rm test test_000.png test_001.png test-0.png test-1.png
Are you sure? y|n y
Alright.

@TODO

• Write about usecases. (it does have very interesting and useful usecases)
• Write unsafe
• Allow for environmental variables.
• Make sure it does not go into infinite loop if is used as an alias.