Bash Read Password without echoing back

Bash Read Password

Bash Read Password – In this Bash Tutorial, we shall learn to read username and password from user, with Password being not echoed back to shell.

We shall use read command with following options,

read -p PROMPT <variable_name>  displays PROMPT without a new line and echoes input read from user, character by character. The input is read to bash variable. This optionp  is suitable for reading Username.

read -sp PROMPT <variable_name>  displays PROMPT without a new line and reads input from user in silent mode (does not echo back user input). The input is read to variable. These optionss,p  are suitable for reading Password.

Example 1 – Read Password

In this example, we will write a Bash Shell Script to read username and password from console.

Bash Shell Script

#!/bin/bash

echo 'Welcome to TutorialKart'

read -p 'Username: ' username
read -sp 'Password: ' password

echo
echo "Thank you $username for showing interest in learning with www.tutorialkart.com"

## this echo is for demo purpose only, never echo password
echo "Your password is $password"

Note : An empty echo is provided after reading Password becauseread -sp  reads input in silent mode and does not echo back input including new line. However pressing enter key after password makes the input be loaded to password variable.

Output

$ ./bash-read-username-password Welcome to TutorialKart
Username: Arjun
Password: 
Thank you Arjun for showing interest in learning with www.tutorialkart.com
Your password is abc@1234

Example 2 – Read Password with *

In this example, we will read password from user with asterisk echoed back in the console/terminal.

Bash Shell Script

#!/bin/bash

unset username
unset password

# read username
read -p 'Username : ' username


echo -n "Enter password : "
stty -echo

#read password
charcount=0
while IFS= read -p "$prompt" -r -s -n 1 ch
do
    # Enter - accept password
    if [[ $ch ==

Output

arjun@arjun-VPCEH26EN:~/workspace/bash/readinput$ ./bash-read-username-password-2 
Username : Arjun
Enter password : ********
Thank you Arjun for showing interest in learning with www.tutorialkart.com
Your password is abc@1234

Recommended Reading : Bash Read User Input

Conclusion

In this Bash Tutorial – Bash Read Password, we have learnt to read password without echoing back the password or masking it with some other characters.