For really sensitive scripts, IMHO your best bet as the script author is: *always* ask for the password. No config files, no commandline parameters, no environment variables.

In a really sensitive environment, someday somebody *will* try it. If he succeeds because your code was careless, people will be angry at you. And they will be right.

With tools like Expect running around for free, your users can always automate interaction with your script, even if it gets complicated and the simple solution jepri gave won't work anymore.

Just make it the user's choice/responsibility.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com

In reply to Re: Handling passwords and sensitive data by clemburg
in thread Handling passwords and sensitive data by zzspectrez

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.