Linux

6984 readers

261 users here now

A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system

Also check out:

Original icon base courtesy of [email protected] and The GIMP

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

275

Am in the only one who cringes at install instructions that require piping some curl output into bash? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

162 comments fedilink hide all child comments

curl https://some-url/ | sh

I see this all over the place nowadays, even in communities that, I would think, should be security conscious. How is that safe? What's stopping the downloaded script from wiping my home directory? If you use this, how can you feel comfortable?

I understand that we have the same problems with the installed application, even if it was downloaded and installed manually. But I feel the bar for making a mistake in a shell script is much lower than in whatever language the main application is written. Don't we have something better than "sh" for this? Something with less power to do harm?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

You could just read the script file first.. Or YOLO trust it like you trust any file downloaded from a relatively safe source.. At least you can read a script.