3 ms·

Counterpoint to the author: have you ever heard of anyone ever having anything catastrophic happen because of this, ever? Have you ever heard of anyone even hav

Counterpoint to the author: have you ever heard of anyone ever having anything catastrophic happen because of this, ever? Have you ever heard of anyone even having it fail with garbage? I haven't.

maddddddddddddd 13y ago
it's hard to hear from someone whose entire hard drive was wiped...
mikegirouard 13y ago
Catastrophic? I can't claim that. But I can tell you that I had a server drop out on me when installing software this way. Here's a quick quote of the bug report I sent to Linode when I was installing Longview. > Bug: Update the nginx (?) error pages to be bash friendly > > root@marius ~]# curl -s https://lv.linode.com/nGiB | sudo bash > bash: line 1: html: No such file or directory > bash: line 2: syntax error near unexpected token `<' > 'ash: line 2: `<head><title>502 Bad Gateway</title></head> > > This could be done by just dumping out echo statements since its already > being parsed by the shell. Additional meta about the request (headers, etc) > could be dumped into comments too… > > # 502 Bad Gateway > echo > echo "Uh oh: Something went sideways during the install!" > echo "(" > echo "Re-running the installer should clear things up." > echo > echo " sudo !!" > echo
- codezero 13y ago
  Yep, I agree this is generally bad practice and is prone to error conditions, but I am mainly addressing the article since it is claiming that this should never be done because of the possible catastrophic consequences, and I just don't think that scenario is likely enough to mount a campaign to abolish this practice :)
hrjet 13y ago
How many would talk about a catastrophic failure that was caused because of their stupidity. Many wouldn't.
mikeash 13y ago
You're right, let's ignore completely realistic failure modes just because nobody's had it happen yet.

Counterpoint to the author: have you ever heard of anyone ever having anything catastrophic happen because of this, ever? Have you ever heard of anyone even having it fail with garbage? I haven't.

maddddddddddddd 13y ago

it's hard to hear from someone whose entire hard drive was wiped...

mikegirouard 13y ago

Catastrophic? I can't claim that. But I can tell you that I had a server drop out on me when installing software this way. Here's a quick quote of the bug report I sent to Linode when I was installing Longview. > Bug: Update the nginx (?) error pages to be bash friendly > > root@marius ~]# curl -s https://lv.linode.com/nGiB | sudo bash > bash: line 1: html: No such file or directory > bash: line 2: syntax error near unexpected token `<' > 'ash: line 2: `<head><title>502 Bad Gateway</title></head> > > This could be done by just dumping out echo statements since its already > being parsed by the shell. Additional meta about the request (headers, etc) > could be dumped into comments too… > > # 502 Bad Gateway > echo > echo "Uh oh: Something went sideways during the install!" > echo "(" > echo "Re-running the installer should clear things up." > echo > echo " sudo !!" > echo

codezero 13y ago
Yep, I agree this is generally bad practice and is prone to error conditions, but I am mainly addressing the article since it is claiming that this should never be done because of the possible catastrophic consequences, and I just don't think that scenario is likely enough to mount a campaign to abolish this practice :)

hrjet 13y ago

How many would talk about a catastrophic failure that was caused because of their stupidity. Many wouldn't.

mikeash 13y ago

You're right, let's ignore completely realistic failure modes just because nobody's had it happen yet.