this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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Do you mean
curl | cator do you really want to create a file called cat?Also piping to cat seems redundant but malicious hosts can detect whether the request is getting redirected, using some clever trick, so it's not.
Also, your chance of spotting something bad in a malicious script is probably quite small.
If you just run the file you just created, it doesn't matter that they detected a redirect. I mean it would be a bit silly to download a script, check it, and then re-download it to pipe into bash.
Saving it to a file is actually a decent method, since you can be sure the script you're reviewing is the same one you're running.
Personally I often will just manually run the install steps in order if the script is simple enough. Half the time it's just a bunch of OS version checks followed by a tar -xf
This is my opinion on
curl | sh/bashtype directions. If the maintainers don't provide a hash so I can confirm that is what they intended, there ain't much I can do unless someone slapped in a function named "totallyNotMalware" into the script. I've looked through scripts, seen what they do, but I'm not good enough to recognize anything funky.