I want to make a ghosted input for a password in one of my programs. Fiddling around with some sample code from the getc() manual, I finally came up with this: 
#!/usr/bin/perl

$BSD_STYLE = 1;
if ($BSD_STYLE) {
    system "stty cbreak </dev/tty >/dev/tty 2>&1";
}
else {
    system "stty", '-icanon', 'eol', "\001";
}

my $in = '';
while (($key = getc(STDIN)) ne "\n") {
    $in .= $key;
    print "\x08 \x08";
}

if ($BSD_STYLE) {
    system "stty -cbreak </dev/tty >/dev/tty 2>&1";
}
else {
    system "stty", 'icanon', 'eol', '^@'; # ASCII null
}
print "$in\n";

[download]
This seems to work perfectly, BUT. Is there an easier/better way of doing this? Failing that, does anyone have any ideas on how to detect whether $BSD_STYLE should be set or not? I was thinking maybe running stty with some parameters and checking the output for some sort of signatures, but this seems to me to be a "bad" solution.
monoxide
I am undecided...

In reply to Ghosted input by monoxide

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.