Read in passwords with bash
24th of March 2005
This has taken me some time to figure out because I couldn't find anything on Google. I think the problem was that I didn't know what to look for.
If you have a bash script that asks the user to enter their username and password you use the read function in sh. But when you read in the password you don't want it to show on the screen what you're writing. Someone could be leaning over your shoulder. Python has a similar standard library module called getpass which works like this:
>>> from getpass import getpass
>>> p = getpass("Password please: ")
Password please:
>>> print "Your password is", len(p), "characters long"
Your password is 5 characters long
>>> p = getpass("Password please: ")
Password please:
>>> print "Your password is", len(p), "characters long"
Your password is 5 characters long
That's fine if you do this via Python; but I needed to do it in one of my bash scripts. Here's how to do it:
#!/bin/bash
read -p "Username: " uname
stty -echo
read -p "Password: " passw; echo
stty echo
read -p "Username: " uname
stty -echo
read -p "Password: " passw; echo
stty echo
Now, hopefully this will help other people who get stuck with the same problem.