Linux

6466 readers

682 users here now

A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system

Also check out:

Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Ategon@programming.dev

anzo@programming.dev

dwraf_of_ignorance@programming.dev

276

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

154 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] 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 23 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 14 hours ago

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

load more comments (4 replies)

load more comments (15 replies)