The curl-bash pattern

This is a common approach to installing various tools via a terminal prompt. You see this commonly done like so: curl example.com/install.sh | bash

The curl-bash pattern is an approach to installing software on your local machine via your terminal. It utilizes curl to download a script which is then piped (i.e. | ) into bash. This enables the script to execute code on your machine which then does whatever setup or installation steps it needs to do to install the target software. Example:

curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash