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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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[–] stevedice@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you've downloaded and audited the script, there's no reason to pipe it from curl to sh, just run it. No https necessary.

[–] isaaclw@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The https is to cover the factthat you might have missed something.

I guess I download and skim out of principle, but they might have hidden something in there.

[–] stevedice@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Wat. All https does is encrypt the connection when downloading. If you've already downloaded the file to audit it, then it's in your drive, no need to use curl to download it again and then pipe it to sh. Just click the thing.

[–] lemmeBe@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, https was for downloading it in the first place. My bad, I didn't get my thoughts out in the right order.

[–] stevedice@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

That makes sense. I probably should have gotten it from context.