Re: RFE: Echo dots option for 'read -s'

Chet Ramey <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.shells.bash.bugs
Organization ITS, Case Western Reserve University
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 12/22/25 2:52 AM, Robert Elz wrote:
>      Date:        Sun, 21 Dec 2025 13:23:29 -0800
>      From:        Bruce Jerrick <[email protected]>
>      Message-ID:  <[email protected]>
> 
>    |     I don't think it would "rarely" be used.  It would be a good thing
>    |     to have when reading a password.
> 
> Displaying anything while reading passwords is a security problem,
> it makes it too easy for someone who can, even just briefly, observe
> the screen, to determine how many characters long the password is.

The most useful iterations of this strategy deliberately display a
different number of characters than are actually input. Of course,
without a toggle to make the password visible, however briefly, that
strategy hurts users who are not sure how many characters they entered.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    [email protected]    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
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