Command line utility to retrieve password, that has no echo back

Question

Bash builtin read command doesn't seem to support it, now I need to let user input a password while no echo should be displayed, what tool can I use?

Answer 1

#!/bin/bash
stty -echo
IFS= read -p 'Enter password: ' -r password
stty echo
printf '\nPassword entered: %s\n' "$password"

• stty -echo turns off the terminal echo, which is the display you're talking about;
• IFS= is necessary to preserve whitespace in the password;
• read -r turns off backslash interpretation.

In bash you can also use read -s, but this feature isn't standard across shells.