Show HN: Prompting LLMs in Bash scripts
10 comments
·February 27, 2025wunderwuzzi23
Beware of ANSI escape codes where the LLM might hijack your terminal, aka Terminal DiLLMa.
https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/terminal-dillmas-p...
chilipepperhott
That's actually crazy and I'll keep it in mind. Right now, I am mostly using it for data generation, so no untrusted prompts are going in. I'll add a disclaimer to the repo.
wunderwuzzi23
One solution is to convert them to caret notation before printing.
I have a demo here: https://github.com/wunderwuzzi23/terminal-dillma/blob/main/d...
It's like cat -v, which shows non-printable characters rather then allowing them to be interpreted by a terminal.
thephyber
Are there any projects to sanitize the output of LLMs before it is injected into Bash scripts or other source code?
I get the feeling this will start to break into the OWASP Top 10 in the next few years…
jmholla
While on the topic, does anybody have a good utility to sanitize things? I'm imagining something I can pipe to:
xclip -selection clipboard -o | sanitize
thephyber
A previous company tried to do this with a single “clean_xss” function. It’s not possible because different contexts of code have different sanitization logic. JSON encoding, URL encoding, DOM sources and sinks, HTML attributes, SCRIPT tag, CSS, etc all are escaped or sanitized in different ways. Trying to make a single function/script with no knowledge of contexts just makes the developer sense more security than exists.
TheDong
I feel like the incumbent for running llm prompts, including locally, on the cli is llm: https://github.com/simonw/llm?tab=readme-ov-file#installing-...
How does this compare?
zoobab
Did a similar curl script to ask questions to Llama3 hosted at Duckduckgo:
null
https://github.com/elijah-potter/ofc