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?
To be fair that’s because Linux funnels you to the safeguard-free terminal where it’s much harder to visualize what’s going on and fewer checks to make sure you’re doing what you mean to be doing. I know it’s been a trend for a long time where software devs think they are immune from mistakes but…they aren’t. And nor is anyone else.