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?
Can you not just run the curl or wget without piping it into bash, first? This way you could inspect what the script wants to do.
I do, but some of these scripts are quite complex and hard to parse. When all I would really need to do this myself is a direct download URL and unzip/untar in a folder of my choice, it’s a pain.