As part of my PhD research, I developed a shell scripting language (shill-lang.org, previously on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9328277) with features that provide safety belts against this sort of error. From speaking to administrators and developers, we believe these types of errors cause take much more worry and time than they are worth.

Now that I'm graduating, we've started the process of refining Shill into a product that we can offer to administrators and developers to make their lives simpler. If this sounds like a tool you wish you had (or if you wish a similar tool existed for your platform of choice), we'd love to hear from you.