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?

    • brian@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      plenty of package managers have.

      flatpak doesn’t require any admin to install a new app

      nixos doesn’t run any code at all on your machine for just adding a package assuming it’s already been cached. if it hasn’t been cached it’s run in a sandbox. the cases other package managers use post install configuration scripts for are a different mechanism which possibly has root access depending on what it is.

        • brian@programming.dev
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          2 months ago

          idk if 2 users is fair, it may just be my circles but I see nixos mentioned more than almost anything else on lemmy/hn/etc in the past couple years