Linux do not provide any special or specific command to read password. However, bash shell comes with builtin command called read. It read date from the standard input (keyboard), or from file descriptor FD if the -u option is supplied. General syntax is as follows:
read -s -p "Password: " VARIABLE
Where,
- -s: Do not display password on screen. It causes input coming from a terminal/keyboard to not be echoed
- -p: "Password: ": Display text message
- VARIABLE: Bash variable in which your password stored
For example, try out following example at shell prompt:
$ read -s -p "Enter Password: " mypasswordOutput:
Enter Password:
Now display password:
$ echo $mypassword See complete script to accept password using read command.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks!
Please I want to y1, y2 and y3 to have values piped in by the pipe (|) and read to read from the file and asign them to the variables but
export tukur=2
test is a file contain 3 columns say: aa bb cc
after excuting the following command y1, y2, y3 dont contain anythin pls could someone help?
tail -n +$tukur home/tukur/test | read -r y1 y2 y3
Thank you,
Tukur Dan-Asabe.
Tukur,
Assuming that your file.txt is as follows:
val1 val2 val3
Here is a shell script:
#!/bin/sh
while read line
do
# store field 1
F1=$(echo $line|cut -d” ” -f1)
# store field 2
F2=$(echo $line|cut -d” ” -f2)
# store field
F3=$(echo $line|cut -d” ” -f3)
echo $F1 ” ” $F2 ” ” $F3
done < file.txt
Var $F1 $F2 and $F3 stores the value. If you need more help try out shell scripting forum @ http://forum.cyberciti.biz/
Thanks nixcraft,
Unfortunately, read -s only works if the first line of your script sets the shell to bash. Tested in ubuntu.
IF THIS does work
#!/bin/sh
set to
#!/bin/bash
Thank for this post, very interesting.
Hi Vivek,
How to make a one liner that can implement the prompt script to run multiple times?
eg. the simplest one i can think of:
i have one user list, name it as userlist.txt with content as below:
mary:mary@mail.com
kent:kent@mail.com
judy:judy@mail.com
……
with a script that used to reset single user password, resetpwd.sh
#!/bin/bash
user=$1
read -p “reset user password (y/n)” yn
case $yn in
y|Y)
echo “plsresetlater” | passwd –stdin $user &> /dev/null;;
n|N)
echo “user password did not change”;;
esac
then run the one liner by piping all the username to the resetpwd.sh; see output:
reset user password (y/n) y #user mary
reset user password (y/n) n #user kent
user password did not change
reset user password (y/n) n #user judy
user password did not change
……
i have tried the awk; not working
awk -F “:” ‘{print $1}’ userlist.txt | while read users; do resetpwd.sh $users; done
hi guys,
if in the middle of execution of script ,
some process asked for some input from keyboard . How can i provide that input from the script?