Bash Scripting – Bash Read Password without Echoing back
Generally, you can see on the login page, whenever we type a password either it show dot (•) or asterisk (*) instead of a password. They do so because to protect our system or account. In such a case, the login page read the password and in place of the password, it will show a dot or asterisk. And in some cases, a dot or asterisk also may not appear it means it displays nothing in place of a password.
Let see how to read the password without echoing back
First, create a file named ” User.sh ” using the following command
$ touch User.sh
Now open ” User.sh ” in the text editor
$ nano User.sh
Now write the below bash script into ” User.sh “
#!/bin/bash echo "Enter Username : " # read username and echo username in terminal read username echo "Enter Password : " # password is read in silent mode i.e. it will # show nothing instead of password. read -s password echo echo "Your password is read in silent mode."
Note: Here ‘ -s ‘ is used to read passwords because it will read passwords in silent mode.
Now save the above bash script and run ” User.sh ” by following the command
$ chmod +x ./User.sh $ ./User.sh
Output :
Here, we can see clearly that the above script will read username as well as password but it does not echo the password.
Let see how to read the password with ” * “
Now, create a file named ” Password.sh ” using the following command
$ touch Password.sh
Now, open ” Password.sh ” in the text editor
$ nano Password.sh
Now write below bash script into ” Password.sh “
#!/bin/bash password="" echo "Enter Username : " # it will read username read username pass_var="Enter Password :" # this will take password letter by letter while IFS= read -p "$pass_var" -r -s -n 1 letter do # if you press enter then the condition # is true and it exit the loop if [[ $letter == $'\0' ]] then break fi # the letter will store in password variable password=password+"$letter" # in place of password the asterisk (*) # will printed pass_var="*" done echo echo "Your password is read with asterisk (*)."
Note: Here,
- IFS: It is Internal Field Separator used to split words or characters
- -r: It will read the password.
- -p: It will echo input character by character.
- -s: It will read the password in silent mode.
- -n: It does not print the trailing newline.
Now save the above bash script and run ” Password.sh ” by the following command
$ chmod +x ./Password.sh $ ./Password.sh
Output :
Here, we can see clearly that the above script will read username as well as password with an asterisk (*)
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