Hey everyone,
Today's post is about a simple little shell script that solves a problem I'm sure many of us have run into. We've all been there: you're following a tutorial online and you blindly copy a command to paste into your terminal. The example looks something like this:
$ curl https://example.com
If you're not paying attention, you accidentally copy the $ prompt character along with the command. When you paste it and hit enter, your shell throws an error like $: command not found. It's a minor but frequent annoyance.
A Simple, Foolproof Solution
To solve this for myself, I wrote a simple script that I named $ and placed it in my path (~/.local/bin). Now, instead of an error, my shell gives me a helpful confirmation prompt. I call it the "Hey, you might have made a mistake" prompt.
Here's the script:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Simple command wrapper that confirms before running pasted commands
set -euo pipefail
main() {
local status=0
# Reconstruct the command as a safely quoted string for display
local cmd_str=""
for arg in "$@"; do
if [ -z "$cmd_str" ]; then
printf -v cmd_str "%q" "$arg"
else
printf -v cmd_str "%s %q" "$cmd_str" "$arg"
fi
done
# Standard prompt and confirmation
echo "It looks like you pasted a command prefixed with '$'."
echo "Command:"
echo " $cmd_str"
echo
read -r -p "Do you want to run this command? [y/N] " reply
case "$reply" in
[yY] | [yY][eE][sS]) ;;
*)
echo "Canceled."
return 0
;;
esac
# Execute the actual command
"$@" || status=$?
if [ $status -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Command completed successfully."
else
echo "Command failed with exit code $status."
fi
return $status
}
main "$@"
Now, when I accidentally paste a command with a leading dollar sign, I get this instead of an error:
The script simply takes all the arguments passed to it (which is the command you intended to run), asks if you want to execute it, and then runs it if you confirm. It's a tiny quality-of-life improvement that turns a common mistake into a helpful interaction.
As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM