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?
When I modded some subreddits I had an automod rule that would target curl-bash pipes in comments and posts, and remove them. I took a fair bit of heat over that, but I wasn’t backing down.
I had a lot of respect for Tteck and had a couple discussions with him about that and why I was doing that. I saw that eventually he put a notice up that pretty much said what I did about understanding what a script does, and how the URL you use can be pointed to something else entirely long after the commandline is posted.