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?
What does curl even do? Unstraighten? Seems like any other command I’d blindly paste from an internet thread into a terminal window to try to get something on Linux to work.
cURL (pronounced curl) stands for client for URL. It transfers data from a url, which you can then do things with.
Why would they call it that when it’s not a client for all urls? It’s more like httpc
What URLs is it not a client for? As far as I understand it will pull whatever data is presented by whatever URL. cURL doesn’t really care about protocol being http, you can use it with FTP as well, and I haven’t tested it yet but now that I’m curious I wanna see if it works for SMB
I’m not arguing it should, but an easy example of a scheme it doesn’t support is mailto. However I was surprised at the list it does support including mqtt, imap, and pop3.
curl sends requests,
curl lemmy.worldwould return the html of lemmy.worlds homepage. piping it into bash means that you are fetching a shell script, and running it.I think he knows but is commenting on the pathetic state of security culture on Linux. (“Linux is secure so I can do anything without concerns”)
Security through obsecurity strikes again.
I usually just read the shell script, and then paste that into bash.