On 12/19/25 12:24 PM, Martin D Kealey wrote:
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".
I suppose this is the people who never run ssh with login/password, who are not permitted to use `sudo', and don't use other programs that require a password. Not echoing terminal input while reading sensitive data is pretty well ingrained.
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.
Programs that read passwords using getpass()/readpassphrase() could benefit now from adding this functionality there. Of course, one can argue that if readline had this feature, libc developers would be more likely to rearchitect these interfaces to adopt it.
Maybe getty could be convinced to use readline if it included this functionality.
Unlikely, but who knows?
--
``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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