As recently discussed on the Arch Mailing list there appears to have been a large coordinated attack on the AUR some time within the last 24 hours that seems to have resulted in a rather sizable amount of packages being contaminated with malware. This is a good reminder that the AUR is open, unofficial, user-produced, content. The only secure way to use the Arch User Repository is by reviewing every PKGBUILD. While efforts are now underway to clean out any problem packages there still exists ...
Longer than that. In particular, a malicious server can detect when a script is being viewed or downloaded vs being piped to a shell, and can serve something different. https://web.archive.org/web/20250622061208/https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash-server-side/
Wow. Learn something new everyday.
Thanks for sharing.