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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 1 year ago by 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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[–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

linux culture

snigger

you're teaching newbies the wrong lessons

The problem is not that it's teaching bad lessons, it's that it's actually doing bad things.

most people can parse that they're essentially asking you to run some commands at a url

I know not to take it completely literally

Then it needn't be written literally.

I think you're giving the authors of such installation instructions too much credit. I think they intend people to take it literally. I think this because I've argued with many of them.

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