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Comment by maaaaattttt | Hacker News Reader

Not so long ago I used ChatGPT to help me come up with a command to delete files that were older than 7 days.

Fortunately I checked the result before copy pasting what GPT told me as it would have deleted any file older than 7 days on the machine. I know it was “my fault” to begin with as I didn’t explicitly specify “in the current directory” or “in a given directory”. But I can see how making such a (very nice nonetheless) tool part of one’s daily routine could quickly lead to damaging outcomes.

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For any shell command where a minor mistake has the potential of ruining your day, take a look at “try”, which will allow you to inspect the effects before running it against a live system: https://github.com/binpash/try

That's a great tool! Hope OP's sees this. If the default would be to use "try" when using shelly and I just had to "commit [Y/n]" at the end, then I would seriously consider using it. One could do something like `shelly "my description" --force` to bypass the "try" usage.

> Please note that try is a prototype and not a full sandbox, and should not be used to execute commands that you don't already trust on your system, (i.e. network calls are all allowed)

True, ‘try’ won’t make reading and understanding a command obsolete, but it’s a great tool to prevent accidental deletion of important files, like OP described.

I was taught that Try was to be sure your command was well formed, if its a complex command with some regex for example...

Though I have not used it much over the years, as I havent had to do much personal regex for a long while.

No, but I done something more stupid. I had it help me write a command to delete Woocommerce/Wordpress users from my site which were older than 1 year and who had never ordered before.

It deleted tens of thousands of active users who had placed orders. I had a backup which was only a couple of hours old, thank the lord.

Lesson learned.

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