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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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[–] 30p87@feddit.org 2 points 2 days ago

As an Arch user, yeah, PKGBUILDs are a very good solution, at least for specifically Arch Linux (or other distros having the same directory-tree best practices). I have implemented a dozen or so projects in PKGBUILDs, and 150 or so from the AUR. It gives users a very easy way to essentially manually install yet control stuff. And you can just put it into the AUR, so other users can either just use it, or first read through, understand, maybe adapt and then use it. It shows that there is no need for packages to solely be either the authors, nor the distro maintainers responsibility.