[CLUE-Tech] Bash and password entry

[Jason Friedman]

There's an application called Expect which specializes in this kind of
thing.

On Sun, 24 Mar 2002, Matt Gushee wrote:

> Hi, all--
>
> I was wondering how you can handle password entry in a shell script.
> I was thinking about writing a script that would synchronize certain
> directories on 2 hosts, using scp ... obviously it would be nice not
> to have to enter a password/passphrase for each file copied, but I
> don't know how (or if) I could store a password in a variable and
> reuse it.
>
> I now realize that for this particular problem the easiest and probably
> best solution is just to run the script in an ssh-agent session. But
> I've thought in the past about automating various tasks that involve
> passwords, and there isn't always a convenient password-preserving
> shell available. Is there a utility you can call from bash to handle
> passwords?
>