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?

  • rah@feddit.uk
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    1 day ago

    If you can’t review a bash script before running it without having an unnecessarily complex one-liner provided to you

    Providing an easily copy-and-pastable one-liner does not imply that the reader could not themselves write such a one-liner.

    Having the capacity to write one’s own commands doesn’t imply that there is no value in having a command provided.

    unnecessarily complex

    LOL

    • gaylord_fartmaster@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I don’t think you realize that if your goal is to have a simple install method anyone can use, even redirecting the output to install.sh like in your examples is enough added complexity to make it not work in some cases. Again, those are not made for people that know bash.

      • rah@feddit.uk
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        9 hours ago

        even redirecting the output to install.sh like in your examples is enough added complexity to make it not work in some cases

        You can’t have any install method that works in all cases.

        if your goal is to have a simple install method anyone can use

        Similarly, you can’t have an install method anyone can use.