this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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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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[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Loads of distros have user packing like arch and nixos... also many distors accept donations to package your software either way so my point stands even then.

[–] Shareni@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Meanwhile nix install instructions start of with a curl

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] brian@programming.dev 1 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

the instructions for installing on not nixos https://nixos.org/download/

[–] Shareni@programming.dev -1 points 1 day ago

What part is confusing you?