this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
276 points (96.6% liked)

Linux

6466 readers
657 users here now

A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system

Also check out:

Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 points 2 days ago

Those just don't get installed. I refuse to install stuff that way. It's to reminiscent of installing stuff on windows. "Pssst, hey bud, want to run this totally safe executable on your PC? It won't do anything bad. Pinky promise". Ain't happening.

The only exception I make is for nix on non-nixos machines because thwt bootstraps everything and I've read that script a few times.

Anti Commercial-AI license