Nano write check before editing

Duffy — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:29:35 +0000

Have you ever been using nano to edit a long configuration file and when you've just finished you go to save and you get "Error writing /dir/somefile: Permission denied" as you've forgotten to use sudo or switch user if so this tutorial might just be your solution. What this does is it runs a script to check if you have write access on the file if you do it will continue and open nano as normal if you don't it will ask you do you want to continue so lets get started

Save the following to /usr/bin/writecheck

#!/bin/bash
FILE="$1"

[ $# -eq 0 ] && exit 1

if [ -w "$FILE" ]
then
nano $FILE
else
   echo "You Do Not Have Write Acess To $FILE"
   echo -n "Do You Want To Continue (y/n)?"
   read reply
   [ $reply == "y" ] && nano $FILE
fi

Allow the script to be executed
```
chmod +x /usr/bin/writecheck
```

Finally we need to add a alias for it

echo "alias nano='writecheck'" >> /etc/bash.bashrc

Tuts4Tech » check

Nano write check before editing