How do I echo stars (*) when reading password with `read`?
read -s
should put it in silent mode:
-s Silent mode. If input is coming from a terminal, characters are not echoed.
See the read
section in man bash
.
As Mark Rushakoff pointed out, read -s
will suppress the echoing of characters typed at the prompt. You can make use of that feature as part of this script to echo asterisks for each character typed:
#!/bin/bash
unset password
prompt="Enter Password:"
while IFS= read -p "$prompt" -r -s -n 1 char
do
if [[ $char == $'\0' ]]
then
break
fi
prompt='*'
password+="$char"
done
echo
echo "Done. Password=$password"
I really liked the answer that Wirone gave, but I didn't like that the backspacing would continue removing characters even back into the "Enter password: " prompt.
I also had some issues where pressing keys too rapidly would cause some of the characters to actually print on the screen... never a good thing when prompting for a password. =)
The following is my modified version of Wirone's answer which addresses these issues:
#!/bin/bash
unset PASSWORD
unset CHARCOUNT
echo -n "Enter password: "
stty -echo
CHARCOUNT=0
while IFS= read -p "$PROMPT" -r -s -n 1 CHAR
do
# Enter - accept password
if [[ $CHAR == $'\0' ]] ; then
break
fi
# Backspace
if [[ $CHAR == $'\177' ]] ; then
if [ $CHARCOUNT -gt 0 ] ; then
CHARCOUNT=$((CHARCOUNT-1))
PROMPT=$'\b \b'
PASSWORD="${PASSWORD%?}"
else
PROMPT=''
fi
else
CHARCOUNT=$((CHARCOUNT+1))
PROMPT='*'
PASSWORD+="$CHAR"
fi
done
stty echo
echo $PASSWORD