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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 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Unpopular opinion, these are handy for quickly installing in a new vm or container (usually throwaway) where one don't have to think much unless the script breaks. People don't install thing on host or production multiple times, so anything installed there is usually vetted and most of the times from trusted sources like distro repos.

For normal threat model, it is not much different from downloading compiled binary from somewhere other than well trusted repos. Windows software ecosystem is famously infamous for exactly the same but it sticks around still.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah and windows is famous for botnets lol.