In Bash, how to add “Are you sure [Y/n]” to any co

Question

In this particular case, I'd like to add a confirm in Bash for

Are you sure? [Y/n]

for Mercurial's hg push ssh://[e-mail]//somepath/morepath, which is actually an alias. Is there a standard command that can be added to the alias to achieve it?

The reason is that hg push and hg out can sound similar and sometimes when I want hgoutrepo, I may accidentlly type hgpushrepo (both are aliases).

Update: if it can be something like a built-in command with another command, such as: confirm && hg push ssh://... that'd be great... just a command that can ask for a yes or no and continue with the rest if yes.

Answer 1

Not the same, but idea that works anyway.

#!/bin/bash  
i='y'  
while [ ${i:0:1} != n ]  
do  
    # Command(s)  
    read -p " Again? Y/n " i  
    [[ ${#i} -eq 0 ]] && i='y'  
done  

Output:
Again? Y/n N
Again? Y/n Anything
Again? Y/n 7
Again? Y/n &
Again? Y/n nsijf
$

Now only checks 1st character of $i read.

Answer 2

Here is my solution that using localised regex. So in german also "j" for "Ja" would be interpreted as yes.

First argument is the question, if the second argument is "y" than yes would be the default answer otherwise no would be the default answer. The return value is 0 if the answer was "yes" and 1 if the answer was "no".

function shure(){
    if [ $# -gt 1 ] && [[ "$2" =~ ^[yY]*$ ]] ; then
        arg="[Y/n]"
        reg=$(locale noexpr)
        default=(0 1)
    else
        arg="[y/N]"
        reg=$(locale yesexpr)
        default=(1 0)
    fi
    read -p "$1 ${arg}? : " answer
    [[ "$answer" =~ $reg ]] && return ${default[1]} || return ${default[0]}
}

Here is a basic usage

# basic example default is no
shure "question message" && echo "answer yes" || echo "answer no"
# print "question message [y/N]? : "

# basic example default set to yes
shure "question message" y && echo "answer yes" || echo "answer no"
# print "question message [Y/n]? : "

Answer 3

Here is roughly a snippet that you want. Let me find out how to forward the arguments.

read -p "Are you sure you want to continue? <y/N> " prompt
if [[ $prompt == "y" || $prompt == "Y" || $prompt == "yes" || $prompt == "Yes" ]]
then
  # http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1537673/how-do-i-forward-parameters-to-other-command-in-bash-script
else
  exit 0
fi

Watch out for yes | command name here :)

Answer 4

This may be a hack:

as in question In Unix / Bash, is "xargs -p" a good way to prompt for confirmation before running any command?

we can using xargs to do the job:

echo ssh://[e-mail]//somepath/morepath | xargs -p hg push

of course, this will be set as an alias, like hgpushrepo

Example:

$ echo foo | xargs -p ls -l
ls -l foo?...y
-rw-r--r--  1 mikelee    staff  0 Nov 23 10:38 foo

$ echo foo | xargs -p ls -l
ls -l foo?...n

$

Answer 5

Well, here's my version of confirm, modified from James' one:

function confirm() {
  local response msg="${1:-Are you sure} (y/[n])? "; shift
  read -r $* -p "$msg" response || echo
  case "$response" in
  [yY][eE][sS]|[yY]) return 0 ;;
  *) return 1 ;;
  esac
}

These changes are:

1. use local to prevent variable names from colliding
2. read use $2 $3 ... to control its action, so you may use -n and -t
3. if read exits unsuccessfully, echo a line feed for beauty
4. my Git on Windows only has bash-3.1 and has no true or false, so use return instead. Of course, this is also compatible with bash-4.4 (the current one in Git for Windows).
5. use IPython-style "(y/[n])" to clearly indicate that "n" is the default.

Answer 6

read -r -p "Are you sure? [Y/n]" response
  response=${response,,} # tolower
  if [[ $response =~ ^(yes|y| ) ]] || [[ -z $response ]]; then
      your-action-here
  fi