Proposed patch to datacopy to allow passwords to be read from stdin (retry posting)

(I'm posting this a second time because I forgot to include the change to the "usage" info in the previous posting.   Apologies for the noise)

The patch below would permit the datacopy utility to use a dash for the password in the source or destination server parameter to mean "read from standard in".   For example:

  datacopy -Smyserver/myusername/-/mydatabase/mytable ...

Upon finding a dash for the password, datacopy would prompt for the password and read it in.

Using a dash for a parameter to specify "read from stdin" is a typical style for many Unix/Linux utilities.

This feature is needed to prevent the security violation of putting a password on the command line (which makes it visible to ps -f in Unix/Linux).    For batch (non-interactive)
jobs in an enterprise environment, this is a mandatory requirement.    Using kerberos might be better, but that's a much harder change.

Ben Slade
DBA @ NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov


diff -u datacopy.c.orig datacopy.c
--- datacopy.c.orig     2011-05-16 04:51:40.000000000 -0400
+++ datacopy.c  2012-08-16 11:43:08.545352000 -0400
@@ -246,6 +246,10 @@
                                        if (!tok)
                                                return FALSE;
                                        pdata->spass = strdup(tok);
+                                        if( strcmp(pdata->spass,"-") == 0 ) {
+                                          printf("Enter Source Password : ");
+                                          pdata->spass = gets_alloc();
+                                        }
 
                                        tok = strtok(NULL, "/");
                                        if (!tok)
@@ -277,6 +281,10 @@
                                        if (!tok)
                                                return FALSE;
                                        pdata->dpass = strdup(tok);
+                                        if( strcmp(pdata->dpass,"-") == 0 ) {
+                                          printf("Enter Destination Password : ");
+                                          pdata->dpass = gets_alloc();
+                                        }
 
                                        tok = strtok(NULL, "/");
                                        if (!tok)
@@ -1119,6 +1127,7 @@
        fprintf(stderr, "usage: datacopy [-t | -a | -c owner] [-b batchsize] [-p packetsize] [-v] [-d]\n");
        fprintf(stderr, "       [-S server/username/password/database/table]\n");
        fprintf(stderr, "       [-D server/username/password/database/table]\n");
+        fprintf(stderr, "       (a dash for the password means prompt for the password and read from stdin)\n" );
        fprintf(stderr, "       -t : truncate target table before loading data\n");
        fprintf(stderr, "       -a : append data to target table\n");
        fprintf(stderr, "       -c : create table owner.table before loading data\n");