Password masking

[arkamedis21]

Hi,
I am looking for a way to mask user-input in my perl scripts. I have perl script which ask's for a user password. I am wondering if something like this is possible in perl.

C:\myscript.prl Password: ********

or maybe the password is not echoed back to the user at all. I am looking for a solution that will work both on Windows, and UNIX. I know in UNIX something like this is possible.

print "Password : ";
system ("stty -echo");
my $password = <STDIN>
system ("stty echo");

But for windows I was not able to find a way to turn command echoing off in the command prompt.

[Kanji]

Have you looked at Term::ReadKey's (alt./ppd) ReadMode?

ReadMode( noecho  => STDIN );
my $password = <STDIN>;
ReadMode( restore => STDIN );

Things get a little trickier if you want asterisks to show up inplace of input, but nothing ReadKey, a loop, and print '*' can't handle...

    --k.

[djw]

You may want to take at a look at Term::ReadKey from CPAN. From the docs:

The terminal mode function is controlled by the "ReadMode" function, which takes a single numeric argument, and an optional filehandle. This argument should be one of the following:
• 0: (Reset) Restore original settings.
• 1: (Cooked) Change to what is commonly the default mode, echo on, buffered, signals enabled, Xon/Xoff possibly enabled, and 8-bit mode possibly disabled.
• 2: (Cooked-Invisible) Same as 1, just with echo off. Nice for reading passwords.
• 3: (CBreak) Echo off, unbuffered, signals enabled, Xon/Xoff possibly enabled, and 8-bit mode possibly enabled.
• 4: (Raw) Echo off, unbuffered, signals disabled, Xon/Xoff disabled, and 8-bit mode possibly disabled.
• 5: (Really-Raw) Echo off, unbuffered, signals disabled, Xon/Xoff disabled, 8-bit mode enabled if parity permits, and CR to CR/LF translation turned off.

I didn't try it out, but it looks to be exactly what you need.

djw