In Bash, how to add “Are you sure [Y/n]” to any command or alias?

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://username@www.example.com//some

Answer 1

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]? : "