How to determine that the shell script is safe

Question

I downloaded this shell script from this site.

It's suspiciously large for a bash script. So I opened it with text editor and noticed that behind the code there is a lot of non-sense characters.

I'm afraid of giving the script execution right with chmod +x jd.sh. Can you advise me how to recognize if it's safe or how to set it's limited rights in the system?

thank you

Answer 1

The "non-sense characters" indicate binary files that are included directly into the SH file. The script will use the file itself as a file archive and copy/extract files as needed. That's nothing unusual for an SH installer. (edit: for example, makeself)

As with other software, it's virtually impossible to decide wether or not running the script is "safe".