Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Yes. I had a pretty bad one from a commercial software company. Running any script someone else wrote badly intentionally or otherwise is dangerous. The source is moot. Rather than provide distribution packages they had a shell script that installed and updated their stuff. If you ran the update script it would evaluate rm -rf $(SOFTWARE_ROOT)/

That environment variable was not set if the software hadn’t been installed and it wouldn’t run unless it was a root shell.

Guess who ran the update script instead of the install script and hosed the machine? I gave them a whole lifetime of bile over that.

The product turned out to be horrible as well.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: