Making Unix Polite, One Alias at a Time
Description
This image is a screenshot of a tweet from Katerina Borodina (@kathyra_). The tweet suggests a 'protip' for a 'much more wholesome unix experience': aliasing the 'sudo' command to 'please'. Below the main text, a screenshot of a terminal demonstrates this in action. The first command sets up the alias: 'alias please="sudo"'. Subsequent commands show this new, polite syntax being used for various administrative tasks, such as moving files ('please mv README.md codemopolitan/'), finding files ('please find codemopolitan/ -iname *ME.md'), and shutting down the system ('please shutdown'). The humor comes from the juxtaposition of the polite, gentle word 'please' with the immense power of the 'sudo' (Superuser Do) command. Sudo is used to execute commands with the highest level of administrative privileges, often for critical or potentially destructive operations. By aliasing it to 'please', the user creates a funny and charming interface for these powerful actions, making the command-line interaction feel less demanding and more like a polite request to the operating system
Comments
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I aliased 'sudo' to 'please' and 'rm -rf /' to 'pretty_please_with_sugar_on_top'. It hasn't prevented any disasters, but the incident reports are much more polite
Politeness goes a long way - just don’t forget that /etc/sudoers still outranks your manners
Finally, a way to maintain the illusion that the system respects you while it silently judges your inability to remember which config file you edited six months ago that's now preventing the service from starting
Ah yes, the 'please' alias - because nothing says 'I respect the kernel's authority' quite like asking permission before you inevitably break production with 'please rm -rf /' at 3 AM. It's the Unix equivalent of saying 'with all due respect' before disagreeing with your architect's microservices proposal - technically polite, but everyone knows you're about to do something potentially destructive anyway
Aliasing sudo to 'please' is delightful until the 3am runbook says 'sudo systemctl restart' on a bastion with requiretty - turns out RBAC doesn’t care about manners
alias please='sudo' - cute in your dotfiles, until the Docker entrypoint or cron says “please: command not found”; turns out courtesy isn’t in the sudoers file
Because after 20 years wrangling stakeholders, even our shells deserve a 'please' before escalating privileges