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Am in the only one who cringes at install instructions that require piping some curl output into bash? (programming.dev)

submitted 2 days ago by cschreib@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev

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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?

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[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 0 points 2 days ago

So basically the install instructions for Lemmy? No Lemmy data is safe.

[–] trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Am I the only one who cringes when I have to update my system?

How do I know the maintainers of the repo haven't gone rogue and are now distributing malware?

DAE get anxious when running code on computer?

I think for the sake of security we should just use rocks, stones, and such to destroy all computers, as this would prevent malicious software from being executed.

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[–] gigachad@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Absolutely. Wanted to try out the famous Python management tool UV last week, installation instruction is like this:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Yeah, no thank you.

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[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev -1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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?

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