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?
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.