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
    22·
    21 hours ago

    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.

    So you are concerned with security, but you understand that there aren’t actually any security concerns… and actually you’re worried about coding mistakes in shitty Bash?