File analysis

Most command safety hooks stop at the command line. rippy goes one step further: when a command points at an executable script or SQL file, rippy reads the file contents and analyzes them before making a decision.

This catches the case where an AI tool silently writes a destructive script and then runs it — the command itself (python script.py) looks innocent in isolation.

Supported file types

File type	Triggered by	What rippy looks for
Python (.py)	python, python3, uv run, poetry run, …	Dangerous imports (os, subprocess, shutil), destructive calls (shutil.rmtree, os.remove, subprocess.run), file writes to sensitive paths
SQL (.sql)	psql -f, mysql <, sqlite3 <, …	Read-only vs. write intent — SELECT is safe, DROP / DELETE / UPDATE / TRUNCATE needs approval
Shell (.sh, .bash, .zsh)	bash script.sh, sh script.sh	Recursive analysis: each command in the script is walked through rippy’s own rules
AWK (.awk)	awk -f script.awk	system(…) calls, shell escapes
GraphQL (.graphql, .gql)	GraphQL CLIs	Mutation detection

How the decision is made

1. Rippy identifies a file argument it knows how to analyze.
2. It reads the file from disk (read-only, size-limited).
3. It runs the language-specific classifier over the contents.
4. The classifier emits one of three results:
   • Safe → command is auto-approved.
   • Dangerous → command is blocked or asked about, with the offending file contents quoted back to the AI tool as guidance.
   • Unknown → command falls through to ask.

The SQL classifier, in particular, is a full read-only detector — not a regex hack — so SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = 'DROP TABLE' is still correctly classified as a read.

Why heuristic, not perfect

File analysis is explicitly heuristic. Things like import os as system in Python, or SQL that builds its statement dynamically, can defeat a purely static check. That’s fine — when the classifier sees anything it can’t prove safe, the result is ask, never silent allow. The goal is to turn “blind execution of AI-written scripts” into “human review of suspicious ones”.