On Sat, 20 Dec 2025, 01:50 Stan Marsh, <[email protected]> wrote: > From: Chet Ramey > > > Doesn't this seem like incredible overkill for something that is rarely > > requested and would be rarely used? >
It's more of a chicken-and-egg situation. By the time people understand enough to be able to ask for it, they'll no longer need it. This change is to benefit the non-technical users who equate "no echo" with "refusing to accept input". It simply does not occur to them that input can be "invisible". If this (or something equivalent) were part of the standard readline library, it would then make sense for applications to start using readline to request sensitive information from users. It's the sort of thing that doesn't seem important to those of us who > understand why it is the way it is, but, unfortunately, it does come > up from time to time on the various platform support boards. You see > posts from people who say things like "It locked up and I couldn't > type" or "It wouldn't take my password, so I pulled the power cord", > etc. > Maybe getty could be convinced to use readline if it included this functionality. -Martin >
