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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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[–] easily3667@lemmus.org 2 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

To be fair that's because Linux funnels you to the safeguard-free terminal where it's much harder to visualize what's going on and fewer checks to make sure you're doing what you mean to be doing. I know it's been a trend for a long time where software devs think they are immune from mistakes but...they aren't. And nor is anyone else.