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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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[–] swizzlestick@lemmy.zip 9 points 2 days ago

It's convenience over security, something that creeps in anywhere there is popularity. For those who just want x or y to work without needing to spend their day in the terminal - they're great.

You'd expect these kinds of script to be well tested against their targets and for the user to have/identify the correct target. Their sources should at least point out the security issue and advise to grab and inspect before straight up piping it though. Some I have seen do this.

Running them like this means you put 100% trust in the author, the source and your DNS. Not a big ask for some. Unthinkable for others.