[ddalcino]

I’ve been involved with two different open source projects where, within the last couple of months, users have opened issues complaining about the shell prompts in the documentation, or PRs removing them, because it makes it too hard to copy-paste commands. The PRs were accepted over my objections.

I was taught that you NEVER copy paste anything from the internet into a terminal. You learn what the commands do, and you type them yourself.

Am I just old?

[irjustin]

Goals of focus and trust to gain speed.

The sentiment makes sense locally, but at some point you either need to trust the thing you're working with or you do it yourself.

There's not enough time in a day to "learn the commands yourself" for everything you do, but if you personally choose to learn and type the commands yourself, great!

It's also okay to trust others with what you're doing.

If you run brew, you literally are trusting other's install scripts not to do something malicious. (Seems ironic to run the brew command, but not trust the copy/paste it tells you to do?)

Even if you don't run brew and install/compile the software yourself, you haven't read every line of code that the software is running to know if that's truly safe.

It's not ideal, but you need to trust at some level or you're never going to move forward.

[beermonster]

These days you see lots of people , even Microsoft , having one line scripts to paste and run as root in your terminal. Often ones which fetch the script via a url. Your typical

# curl foo.com/install.sh | bash -

[actually_a_dog]

No, you were taught the right thing. You never know what some random JavaScript is gonna do to the contents of your clipboard when copying from a web page.

Best practice, IMO, is to open as dumb an editor as you can find and pasting the commands into an editor buffer for inspection before running anything in the shell. And, if you don’t understand what it’s ask you to paste into your shell, don’t do it.

Even if you run with JavaScript off entirely, this at least makes you think before you do anything potentially destructive.

[pope_meat]

What we're supposed to do, and what actually happens are different things.

Especially in a situation where you're trying to install something just to get some other thing to work.

[MattGaiser]

In theory, yes you are right. In practice, I have deadlines and people wanting things and I often need to get things I don't understand up and running pretty quickly.