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?

  • rah@feddit.ukEnglish
    11·
    5 hours ago

    Showing people that are running curl piped to bash the script they are about to run doesn’t really accomplish anything. If they can read bash and want to review the script then they can by just opening the URL

    What it accomplishes is providing the instructions (i.e. an easily copy-and-pastable terminal command) for people to do exactly that.

    • gaylord_fartmaster@lemmy.world
      2·
      5 hours ago

      If you can’t review a bash script before running it without having an unnecessarily complex one-liner provided to you to do so, then it doesn’t matter because you aren’t going to be able to adequately review a bash script anyway.