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?
It’s not just protection against security, but also human error.
https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/issues/123
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/20/how-a-steam-bug-once-deleted-all-of-someones-user-data/
Just because I trust someone to write a program in a modern language they are familier in, doesn’t mean I trust them to write an install script in bash, especially given how many footguns bash has.
Hilarious, but not a security issue. Just shitty Bash coding.
And I agree it’s easier to make these mistakes in Bash, but I don’t think anyone here is really making the argument that curl | bash is bad because Bash is a shitty error-prone language (it is).
Definitely the most valid point I’ve read in this thread though. I wish we had a viable alternative. Maybe the Linux community could work on that instead of moaning about it.