Adding a warning to `date -s` calls

Question

I'm prone to calling date -s instead of date -d, and this can go badly when I call it on the wrong server. Is there a way to add a confirmation prompt to date -s so I realize what I've done?

Answer 1

I can't help but state the obvious, that you should be more careful when typing commands... Nevertheless, I would suggest the following as a workaround.

Write a script , that checks the CLI arguments passed to the date command, let's call it /bin/date.sh (example below) and change its permission to 755:

chmod 755 /bin/date.sh
cat /bin/date.sh

#!/bin/bash

### script to prompt at 'date -s'

if [[ $1 == -s* ]]; then
    read -p "*** Are you sure you want to set the date ? [y/n]" ANS
    if [[ $ANS = [Yy] ]]; then
        /bin/date $1
    fi
else
    /bin/date $1
fi

Make an alias in your user's .bashrc file to that script instead like alias date=/bin/date.sh. This way, every time you call date that script is run and it lets you know you issued the set date command flag and asks for confirmation.

You may also avoid using an alias, by simply replacing the date command, like below, but please also change the date binary's name in the script from /bin/date to /bin/date_cmd

mv /bin/date /bin/date_cmd mv /bin/date.sh /bin/date

Hope this helps!