Linux setup steps/Alias the poweroff command

From Nick Jenkins

Sooner or later, probably at 5 PM on a Friday afternoon as you're rushing to get out of the office and down to the pub, you're going to stuff up and do something silly. For me, that silly stuff-up was mistaking a shell on an important production server for a shell on a testing machine, and powering it off, requiring an embarrassed call to a data centre tech to get it turned back on again ASAP. Because of this, I now like to alias the poweroff command, because on a production server, it's a command that you will hopefully only ever want to use once - and that's when it's about to be removed from the data centre. To do this:

nano ~/.bashrc

Uncomment the lines for a coloured ls, and then add these 2 lines:

# Warning on "poweroff" command.
alias poweroff='echo This is a production machine! If you REALLY want to poweroff, do /sbin/poweroff'