[CLUE-Tech] Bash and password entry

[Jeffery Cann]

Matt,

This perl function will do what you want.  It takes three parameters:

1.  The prompt text.
2.  The default response.
3.  Whether to echo the user's response.

HTH.

sub prompt {
        my ($text,$default,$noecho) = @_;
        my $reply;

        set_echo('OFF') if $noecho;

    if ($default) {
                print "$text [$default]: ";
        } else {
                print "$text: ";
        }

        chomp( $reply = <STDIN> );
        if ($noecho) {
                print "\n" if $noecho;
                set_echo('ON') if $noecho;
        }

    if ($reply) {
            return $reply;
        } else {
                return $default;
        }
}


On Sunday 24 March 2002 13:37, 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?