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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[–] Gronk@aussie.zone 1 points 2 hours ago

Yeah I hate this stuff too, I usually pipe it into a file figure out what it's doing and manually install the program from there.

FWIW I've never found anything malicious from these scripts but my internal dialogue starts screaming when I see these in the wild, I don't want to run some script and not know what it's touching malicious or not it's a PITA.

As a linux user, I like to know what's happening under the hood as best I can and these scripts go against that

[–] Kissaki@programming.dev 2 points 6 hours ago

| sh stands for shake head at bad practices

[–] emberpunk@lemmy.ml 6 points 13 hours ago

You could just read the script file first.. Or YOLO trust it like you trust any file downloaded from a relatively safe source.. At least you can read a script.

[–] Zron@lemmy.world 13 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

For security reasons, I review every line of code before it’s executed on my machine.

Before I die, I hope to take my ‘93 dell optiplex out of its box and finally see what this whole internet thing is about.

[–] moseschrute@lemmy.ml 7 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Not good enough. You should really be inspecting your CPU with a microscope.

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 8 points 17 hours ago

What's stopping the downloaded script from wiping my home directory?

Lol. Lmao

[–] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 13 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

It isn’t more dangerous than running a binary downloaded from them by any other means. It isn’t more dangerous than downloaded installer programs common with Windows.

TBH macOS has had the more secure idea of by default using sandboxes applications downloaded directly without any sort of installer. Linux is starting to head in that direction now with things like Flatpak.

[–] Artyom@lemm.ee 41 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What's stopping the downloaded script from wiping my home directory?

What's stopping any Makefile, build script, or executable from running rm -rf ~? The correct answer is "nothing". PPAs are similarly open, things are a little safer if you only use your distro's default package sources, but it's always possible that a program will want to be able to delete something in your home directory, so it always has permission.

Containerized apps are the only way around this, where they get their own home directory.

[–] easily3667@lemmus.org 6 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

Don't forget your package manager, running someone's installer as root

It's roughly the same state as when windows vista rolled out UAC in 2007 and everything still required admin rights because that's just how everything worked....but unlike Microsoft, Linux distros never did the thing of splitting off installs into admin vs unprivileged user installers.

[–] brian@programming.dev 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

plenty of package managers have.

flatpak doesn't require any admin to install a new app

nixos doesn't run any code at all on your machine for just adding a package assuming it's already been cached. if it hasn't been cached it's run in a sandbox. the cases other package managers use post install configuration scripts for are a different mechanism which possibly has root access depending on what it is.

[–] easily3667@lemmus.org 1 points 1 hour ago

Gonna ignore nix since they have two users, but flatpak is fair. However flatpak is a sandboxing scheme which is distinct from per-user installs. In many cases it can be the better route but not always. I think the reason it's popular on Linux is also the dll hell problem.

If you're worried, download it into a file first and read it.

[–] Boomkop3@reddthat.com 4 points 1 day ago

And don't forget to sudo!

[–] easily3667@lemmus.org 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is just normal Linux poor security. Even giants like docker do this.

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 4 points 17 hours ago

Docker doesn't do this anymore. Their install script got moved to "only do this for testing".

Use a convenience script. Only recommended for testing and development environments.

Now, their install page recommends packages/repos first, and then a manual install of the binaries second.

[–] tatterdemalion@programming.dev 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Back up your data folks. You're probably more likely to accidentally rm -rf yourself than download a script that will do it.

[–] easily3667@lemmus.org 2 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 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.

[–] 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.

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