Shell Non-Interactive Strategy #

No TTY. Any command that waits for input, confirmation, or opens a UI hangs until timeout. Treat this as headless CI.

Rules #

1. Preemptively supply yes/force flags on every command if needed.
2. Never use editors, pagers, REPLs, or -i/-p interactive modes.
3. Prefer your built-in Read/Write/Edit tools over sed/echo/cat for file changes.
4. Use jq for JSON, not python -c "import json...".
5. Overall, prefer native tools over adhoc Python scripts.
6. Keep driving the task. Don't stop after a tool call to wait for instructions unless the task is done.

Banned — will hang #

vim vi nano emacs ed · less more most pg · man git commit (no -m) · git add -p · git rebase -i python node irb ghci (bare) · bash -i · docker run -it · docker exec -it

When there's no flag #

yes | ./script.sh ./configure.sh <<EOF … EOF timeout 30 ./script.sh || echo "timed out" cmd --help | grep -iE "non-interactive|force|yes"