Drop-In Password Dialog?

[ColonelPanic]

Dear Fellow Monks,

I have scripts that connect to a database, and I want to let the user type a password without it being seen on the screen. I know this is a common issue, and the normal solutions are available all over the place (here, for example): either disable terminal echo with system commands, or use Term::ReadKey.

However, my problem is that I run my scripts in Eclipse (using the EPIC plugin). I/O goes through Eclipse's own terminal, which is not accesible through either of these methods.

I wondered if there was a module that creates a simple username/password dialog that could be added to a script in drop-in fashion, without me having to add a bunch of GUI handling to the script. This seems like an obvious, useful idea, but I wasn't able to find anything on CPAN.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[zentara]

Any time you call a Tk script for example, your original script will continue to run after the MainLoop is destroyed. So you can just make your own little password popup like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Tk;

my $mw = new MainWindow();

my $password = '';

my $entry = $mw->Entry(
  -show=>'*',
  -relief=>'ridge',
  -textvariable=>\$password
)->pack;

$entry->bind('<Return>',[\&somesub]);
$entry->focus;

# when the MainLoop is destroyed, the calling script can continue
MainLoop; 

sub somesub {
    $password = $entry->get;
    print "password ->$password\n";
    $mw->destroy;
 }

print "you can continue on here\n"; 
<>; #wait for keypress to exit;

[ColonelPanic]

Thanks, this looks like it will be very helpful!

[ColonelPanic]

zentara, thanks again for this useful solution. I modified it slightly to also get a username, and it works great!

[tobyink]

I can't find any... which is a shame as it seems quite a useful sort of thing to do. Here's a quick stab at a module that can prompt the user for basic information such as passwords, text entry, file selection, etc.

It provides two backends - one for STDIN/STDOUT, and one that uses the Gnome tool Zenity to provide GUI prompts. The choice of which backend is made automatically.

Read more... (4 kB)

# Usage...
my $ask = Ask->new;
say "GOT: ", $ask->entry(text => "Please enter your password!", hide_t
+ext => 1);

Anyone fancy implementing Tk or Wx backends?

Update: now on Bitbucket and GitHub

[ColonelPanic]

Thanks for putting so much work into this. It looks like a great module concept. I look forward to trying this out when I get back to work.

[tobyink]

A developer release is on CPAN now... Ask-0.000_01.