curl > dev/sda

Summary

To replace your Linux installation with a new OS, you can download a pre-prepared disk image directly to your disk by running a command like this: curl https://something.example/foo.img > /dev/sda # (or whatever your disk is called) No need to save it anywhere first, just pipe it directly to the disk. Then you can reboot into that OS, and congratulations, you’ve installed a new OS. This works even for most EFI machines without any further efibootmgr commands because EFI firmware automatically discovers the new EFI system partition! Why? This command is possible because /dev/sdX, /dev/nvmeX, and other such disks can be directly accessed from the filesystem, following the ancient Unix concept of “everything is a file.” You can write to the /dev/sdX file, and that directly writes to the disk! No, like, why would you want to do this instead of installing Linux any other normal way? Okay, so the reason I initially did this was because I didn’t want to pay Contabo an extra $1.50/mo to have object storage just to be able to spawn VPSes from premade disk images. I thought it was a neat trick, a funny shitpost that riffs on the eternal curl | sh debate. I could write a blog post about it, I tell you about how you can do it yourself, one thousand words, I learn something, you learn something, I get internet points, win win. The problem is that it didn’t stop there. I kept asking one more question. I kept peeling one more layer off the onion. I kept turning one more page in the grimoire… and before I knew it, I ended up with a four part blog series that doesn’t end where you expect it to end. Why don’t we start from the beginning? How to flash a Raspberry Pi the cool way Nowadays, the Raspberry Pi Foundation gives you a piece of software that they built that does everything automatically, but back in my day, you had to do it this way. There’s a Stack Exchange answer that lists the exact series of steps. First, you go to the website in your web browser. Then, you click on the b...