In regards to your second question (How To Keep Text From Being Displayed), I like to make system calls to stty. It's quick and dirty.

#turn off the terminal's echo
`stty -echo` ;
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If you do this sort of thing, don't forget to turn it back on. Just to be extra safe, consider doing this, too:

# turn echo back on, an extra check before we exit
END { `stty echo` }
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It's kind of a mess if the program exits and echo is still off.

Hope it helps. Peace monks,