Terminal Assist

Terminal Assist stops a small set of commands known to break a system or destroy data, and explains what they would have done. Every stop says how to continue if you meant it.

Two layers

	Inside pacman	In your terminal
What it checks	Removing packages	Commands you type in Konsole
Applies to	Every removal, whatever started it: a terminal, a script, an AUR helper or the App Store	Only commands typed into an interactive bash shell
How firm	Firm: the removal does not happen	A safety net for typing mistakes, not a security barrier

What the pacman check stops

Removing any of these, or removing the last kernel installed:

Package	Why
`systemd`	Starts the system; the computer will not start without it.
`glibc`	The C library almost every program needs.
`pacman`	The package manager; you could not install anything back.
`bash`	The system shell; install scripts and start-up need it.
`coreutils`	Basic tools such as `ls`, `cp` and `rm`.
`filesystem`	The basic folder layout.
`sudo`	How you get administrator rights; you could lock yourself out.
`linux-firmware`	Firmware for Wi-Fi, graphics and more.
`mkinitcpio`	Builds the boot image; the next kernel update would not start.
`limine`	The boot loader.
`sakura-snapshot-boot`	Restore points and recovery.

What the terminal check stops

Partial upgrades: pacman -Sy without u, the most common way an Arch-based system breaks. Use pacman -Syu.
Removing a package while ignoring what depends on it (-Rdd), and overwriting another package's files (--overwrite '*').
Building AUR packages as root, with sudo yay, sudo paru or sudo makepkg.
Deleting the system's BTRFS subvolumes, which also deletes the restore points.
Commands that erase disks or file systems: rm -rf /, formatting, writing directly to a disk with dd, and discarding a drive's contents.
Breaking system permissions or ownership, such as making system files writable by everyone.
Running a script straight from the internet, as in curl … | sh. Download it and read it first.
A few others: deleting all scheduled jobs, fork bombs, and writing firmware to a drive.

The terminal check looks at the whole line you type, including commands after ; or && and every part of a pipe. If any part of a line is stopped, none of the line runs. A line that starts with a space may not be kept in the shell's history, depending on your settings; for those, only the first command is checked.

Continuing anyway

Every stop prints the exact way to continue. For the terminal check, put SAKURA_ASSIST_OVERRIDE=1 in front of the command:

SAKURA_ASSIST_OVERRIDE=1 sudo pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring

The pacman check wants the name of the rule it stopped, which the message gives you, so that overriding one check does not switch off the others:

sudo SAKURA_ASSIST_OVERRIDE=glibc pacman -R glibc

Several rules can be named at once, separated by commas.

Changing how it behaves

In SakuraOS settings, choose whether Terminal Assist stops these commands, only warns about them, or does nothing. The setting applies to both layers.

Last checked against the SakuraOS release of 3 October 2026. If your system behaves differently from this page, the page is wrong: please report it.