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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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[–] knexcar@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

What does curl even do? Unstraighten? Seems like any other command I’d blindly paste from an internet thread into a terminal window to try to get something on Linux to work.

[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

cURL (pronounced curl) stands for client for URL. It transfers data from a url, which you can then do things with.

[–] easily3667@lemmus.org 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Why would they call it that when it's not a client for all urls? It's more like httpc

[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 21 hours ago

What URLs is it not a client for? As far as I understand it will pull whatever data is presented by whatever URL. cURL doesn't really care about protocol being http, you can use it with FTP as well, and I haven't tested it yet but now that I'm curious I wanna see if it works for SMB

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

curl sends requests, curl lemmy.world would return the html of lemmy.worlds homepage. piping it into bash means that you are fetching a shell script, and running it.

[–] easily3667@lemmus.org 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

I think he knows but is commenting on the pathetic state of security culture on Linux. ("Linux is secure so I can do anything without concerns")

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 1 points 22 hours ago

Security through obsecurity strikes again.

I usually just read the shell script, and then paste that into bash.