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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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[-] RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

I always try to avoid these, unless the application I'm installing has it's own package management functionality, like Rustup or Nix. Everything else should be handled by the system package manager.

[-] cschreib@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

Ironically, it is rustup that triggered me with this most recently... https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install

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this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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