ColonelPanic has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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.



When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct? --Larry Wall

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Drop-In Password Dialog?
by zentara (Cardinal) on Nov 28, 2012 at 15:40 UTC
    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;

    [download]
    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
    Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh
[reply]
[d/l]
      Thanks, this looks like it will be very helpful!


      When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct? --Larry Wall
[reply]

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



      When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct? --Larry Wall
[reply]
Re: Drop-In Password Dialog?
by tobyink (Canon) on Nov 28, 2012 at 17:17 UTC

    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);

    [download]

    Anyone fancy implementing Tk or Wx backends?

    Update: now on Bitbucket and GitHub

    perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      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.


      When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct? --Larry Wall
[reply]

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

        perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'
[reply]

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