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

submitted 2 weeks ago by cschreib@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev

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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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[–] knexcar@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

What does curl even do? Unstraighten? Seems like any other command I’d blindly paste from an internet thread into a terminal window to try to get something on Linux to work.

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 1 points 2 weeks ago

curl sends requests, curl lemmy.world would return the html of lemmy.worlds homepage. piping it into bash means that you are fetching a shell script, and running it.