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Comment by phaemon | Hacker News Reader

Might be better having something like the following at the top of your script:

    echo "This will STOP THE SERVER. Are you sure you want to  do this?"
    echo "Type 'yes' to continue:"
    read response

    if [[ $response != "yes" ]]
    then
      echo "You must type 'yes' to continue. Aborting."
      exit 1
    fi

    echo "Stopping server ..."

It barely takes any time to type 'yes' but it makes you stop and think.

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That'll make it impossible to use in scripts. This remember me the time I tried to fix my "rm -r * .o" with a CLI trash system, instead of doing proper backups.

Might be better to start reviewing EVERY command one sends to important servers, and testing them if viable. What probably is the line that vijucat took... that's the line that everybody ends up taking, the only thing that changes is the number of accidents needed.

Then you add an optional CLI argument that makes it skip the prompt, and use that version in scripts.

As 'euid' said, you can just add a check. If you don't want to add proper option checking (because this is the only option) you can do something like:

    response=$1

    echo "This will STOP THE SERVER. Are you sure you want to do this?"
    echo "Type 'yes' to continue:"
    [[ $response ]] || read response

    if [[ $response != "yes" ]]
    then
      echo "You must type 'yes' to continue. Aborting."
      exit 1
    fi

    echo "Stopping server ..."

Which will allow you to run the script with "./scriptname.sh yes" to bypass the check.

EDIT: Though, as you say, it is much better not to be running anything like this on a live server anyway. Any change should be part of a deployment procedure that is carefully checked and tested, as well as having a rollback procedure in the event of something horrible happening.

Of course, in the real world, you sometimes don't have that luxury and you just have to hope and pray :-)

Yes, this solution would have worked for our situation.

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