this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah I hate this stuff too, I usually pipe it into a file figure out what it's doing and manually install the program from there.

FWIW I've never found anything malicious from these scripts but my internal dialogue starts screaming when I see these in the wild, I don't want to run some script and not know what it's touching malicious or not it's a PITA.

As a linux user, I like to know what's happening under the hood as best I can and these scripts go against that

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

| sh stands for shake head at bad practices

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For security reasons, I review every line of code before it’s executed on my machine.

Before I die, I hope to take my ‘93 dell optiplex out of its box and finally see what this whole internet thing is about.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Not good enough. You should really be inspecting your CPU with a microscope.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

What's stopping the downloaded script from wiping my home directory?

Lol. Lmao

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It isn’t more dangerous than running a binary downloaded from them by any other means. It isn’t more dangerous than downloaded installer programs common with Windows.

TBH macOS has had the more secure idea of by default using sandboxes applications downloaded directly without any sort of installer. Linux is starting to head in that direction now with things like Flatpak.

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