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?

  • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    4 hours ago

    Hilarious, but not a security issue. Just shitty Bash coding.

    And I agree it’s easier to make these mistakes in Bash, but I don’t think anyone here is really making the argument that curl | bash is bad because Bash is a shitty error-prone language (it is).

    Definitely the most valid point I’ve read in this thread though. I wish we had a viable alternative. Maybe the Linux community could work on that instead of moaning about it.