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?

  • easily3667@lemmus.org
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    4 hours ago

    Gonna ignore nix since they have two users, but flatpak is fair. However flatpak is a sandboxing scheme which is distinct from per-user installs. In many cases it can be the better route but not always. I think the reason it’s popular on Linux is also the dll hell problem.