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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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[–] ricdeh@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Can you not just run the curl or wget without piping it into bash, first? This way you could inspect what the script wants to do.

[–] cschreib@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

I do, but some of these scripts are quite complex and hard to parse. When all I would really need to do this myself is a direct download URL and unzip/untar in a folder of my choice, it's a pain.