I recently answered this question on the beginners-perl mailing list. I think you might find the reponse very helpful.

    use Term::ReadKey;

    ReadMode('noecho');
    $password = ReadLine(0);
[download]

I've never used that before but some may be curious how I found it. Here's the trick:

    perldoc perltoc > perltoc.txt

That sends the perltoc (Perl Table of Contents) to a text file. I sometimes scan through this file to pick up new tricks. When I see something that interests me (such as "password"), I scan through the relevant entries. In this case, I saw the following entries:

    [snip]
    How do I clear the screen?
    How do I get the screen size?
    How do I ask the user for a password?
    How do I read and write the serial port?
    [snip]

The one about asking a user for a password looked useful, so I typed in:

    perldoc -q "How do I ask the user for a password?"

That actually gave a lot more information than what I sent you, so you should give it a try :)

The '-q' options stands for "FAQ keyword", but it can just as easily stand for 'question'.

Cheers,
Ovid

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Term::ReadPassword is kinda cool, but do remember to read the pod, and heed the warnings of the author.

 
___crazyinsomniac_______________________________________
Disclaimer: Don't blame. It came from inside the void
perl -e "$q=$_;map({chr unpack qq;H*;,$_}split(q;;,q*H*));print;$q/$q;"

Sweet guys thanks for all of the input. Problem is restrictions on the Machine I'm running on. They don't like us to have too much du and won't let me get any modules. I just have to use the one's they allocate. Maybe, hopefully, I can convince the admin(a good friend) to grab a small list of modules for this little project, and many future projects as I'm really liking the functionality I can get outta perl.

No offense, but this is kind of retarded. Code takes up space. Whether it's in the form of a pre-written, tested and robust module or in the form of proprietary code that you write/re-invent specifically for this project, it's going to take up disk space. I'll leave it up to you and your admins to determine which solution takes less time to code and support.

Granted, in this case you can get by with a small amount of code, I think it's rather silly to deny the installation of modules because of disk space restrictions. Perl code doesn't take up a lot of space anyway, and disk space is cheap.

system('/usr/bin/stty', '-echo');
  chomp($password=<STDIN>);
  system('/usr/bin/stty', 'echo');
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I have to admit, that looks like you're trying way too hard.

I'd probably give Term::ReadKey a shot if I were you.

  use Term::ReadKey;
  ReadMode 2;
  chomp( my $password = ReadLine );
  ReadMode 0;
[download]

--
Casey
   I am a superhero.