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I was rushing to leave and was still logged into a server so I wanted to shutdown my laptop, but what I didn’t notice is that I was still connected to the remote server. Luckily before pressing enter I noticed I’m not on my machine but on a remote server. So I was thinking there should be a very easy way to prevent it from happening again, to me or to anyone else.

So first thing we need to create a new bash script at /usr/local/bin/confirm with the contents bellow and with execution permissions

#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo "About to execute $1 command"
echo -n "Would you like to proceed y/n? "
read reply

if [ "$reply" = y -o "$reply" = Y ]
then
   $1 "${@:2}"
else
   echo "$1 ${@:2} cancelled"
fi

Now only thing left to do is to setup the aliases so they go through this command to confirm instead of directly calling the command.

So I create the following files

/etc/profile.d/confirm-shutdown.sh

alias shutdown="/usr/local/bin/confirm /sbin/shutdown"

/etc/profile.d/confirm-reboot.sh

alias reboot="/usr/local/bin/confirm /sbin/reboot"

Now when I actually try to do a shutdown/reboot it will prompt me like so.

ilijamt@x1 ~ $ reboot 
Before proceeding to perform /sbin/reboot, please ensure you have approval to perform this task
Would you like to proceed y/n? n
/sbin/reboot  cancelled