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?

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    22 hours ago

    Just direct it into a file, read the script, and run it if you’re happy. It’s just a shorthand that doesn’t require saving the script that will only be used once.