I'd like to be able to somehow print asterisks or whatever to the screen
like gui apps do when someone is entering a password.  Is this
possible???

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I don't think you can do it easily in a shell script.  A C or Perl program
could put the terminal in raw mode and echo *'s.  The program would also
have to handle input editing itself.

--
Barry Margolin, bar...@bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Cambridge, MA
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Please don't send technical questions directly to me, post them to newsgroups.

Infact this method has an advantage over the windows gui method. In the
windows gui method, when the ** are being displayed, atleast the
stealthy on-looker would know the number of characters in your password.
Whereas in this unix method of stty -echo, the cursor simply does not
move, nor does it display anything on the screen.

Hope that helps. Pls. let me know if it worked.

In your shell script, you could enter stty -echo
This command will turn of echo of user input. Then after the password
entry part is over, say stty +echo. Ex:

echo 'Please enter your password:'
stty -echo
read $passwd
stty +echo
...

...

Yes, it is...  Here is some ksh script to do this.

++++++++++++++  START SCRIPT ++++++++++++++
#!/bin/ksh
#Init some stuff...
pass=''
blank='false'

#Main loop executed once for each char typed...
while [ "$blank" != "true" ]
do
  stty raw
  c=`dd bs=1 count=1 2> /dev/null`
  stty -raw

  #Check for a CR.
  if [ -z `echo $c | tr -d "\015"` ]
  then
    blank='true'
  else
    stty echo
    echo "*\c"
    pass=$pass$c
    stty -echo
  fi
done                              
+++++++++++++  END OF SCRIPT ++++++++++++

You may want to check the man pages for dd and for tr if you need
more help with this script.  Feel free to email any follow up ?'s to
me at "dwjo...@azstarnet.com".  I will post the final answers here...

Hope this helps you out....
Dj