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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 1 month 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] 27 points 1 month ago (16 children)

I think safer approach is to:

Download the script first, review its contents, and then execute.
Ensure the URL uses HTTPS to reduce the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

If steam accidentally deleted someone's home directory in a bash script via a single error, I doubt I would catch that one myself.

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