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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 days 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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[–] syklemil@discuss.tchncs.de 28 points 2 days ago

This is simpler than the download, ./configure, make, make install steps we had some decades ago, but not all that different in that you wind up with arbitrary, unmanaged stuff.

Preferably use the distro native packages, or else their build system if it's easily available (e.g. AUR in Arch)