How can I run a script locally from a remote server such as www.mysite.com/script.sh?

Question

How can I run a script locally from a remote server such as www.mysite.com/script.sh

I tried:

. www.mysite.com/script.sh

and it does not work.

Answer 1

If you wrote the script -- meaning that you're absolutely certain you know what it does -- you can just do this:

curl -s http://www.mysite.com/script.sh | sh

That uses curl to fetch the script and pipe it to the Bourne shell. But in general, for anything you didn't actually write yourself, you should do what Grant suggested and read it first, because this is a great way to accidentally run malicious code.

So while this does, of course, "download" the script, it simply sends the data through the pipe rather than saving it to a file.

Answer 2

wget http://www.whatever.com/script.sh

Then read the script to ensure it doesn't do anything malicious.

Then chmod +x script.sh and ./script.sh