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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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[–] thomask@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (19 children)

The security concerns are often overblown. The bigger problem for me is I don't know what kind of mess it's going to make or whether I can undo it. If it's a .deb or even a tarball to extract in /usr/local then I know how to uninstall.

I will still use them sometimes but for things I know and understand - e.g. rustup will put things in ~/.rustup and update the PATH in my shell profile and because I know that's what it does I'm happy to use the automation on a new system.

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 6 points 1 day ago (18 children)

Damn that's bad misinformation. Its a security nightmare

[–] thomask@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

So tell me: if I download and run a bash script over https, or a .deb file over https and then install it, why is the former a "security nightmare" and the latter not?

[–] rocky_patriot@programming.dev 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

For example: A compromised host could detect whether you are downloading the script or piping it.

[–] thomask@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 12 hours ago

I'm confident that if the host is compromised I'm screwed regardless.

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