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?

  • knexcar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    What does curl even do? Unstraighten? Seems like any other command I’d blindly paste from an internet thread into a terminal window to try to get something on Linux to work.

    • irelephant [he/him]🍭@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      curl sends requests, curl lemmy.world would return the html of lemmy.worlds homepage. piping it into bash means that you are fetching a shell script, and running it.

  • zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev
    0·
    4 months ago

    You have the option of piping it into a file instead, inspecting that file for yourself and then running it, or running it in some sandboxed environment. Ultimately though, if you are downloading software over the internet you have to place a certain amount of trust in the person your downloading the software from. Even if you’re absolutely sure that the download script doesn’t wipe your home directory, you’re going to have to run the program at some point and it could just as easily wipe your home directory at that point instead.