this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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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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[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip -1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Distros do the packaging. Devs can not be trusted

[–] Aux@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's how you end up without software.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's how you end up with a secure well tested system. Having the distro do software reviews adds another level of validation. Devs are bad about shipping software with vulnerable dependencies and stuff like that.

[–] Aux@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago

And then you install wordpress, lol.

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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 1 month ago (1 children)

Meanwhile nix install instructions start of with a curl

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

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

[–] Shareni@programming.dev -1 points 1 month ago

What part is confusing you?