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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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[-] drmoose@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Loads of distros have user packing like arch and nixos... also many distors accept donations to package your software either way so my point stands even then.

[-] Shareni@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago

Meanwhile nix install instructions start of with a curl

[-] drmoose@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago
[-] brian@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

the instructions for installing on not nixos https://nixos.org/download/

[-] Shareni@programming.dev -1 points 2 days ago

What part is confusing you?

this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
277 points (96.3% liked)

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