Inquire password

[Yyrkoon_]

Good morning all,

I am trying to make a DCL which inquire user name and password and I would like to show on the screen "*" or nothing instead the written password. Regretfully I have not found a way to do that despite I suppose it should not be difficult.

Can you, please, help me?

Thanks in advance.

[Volker Halle · Accepted solution]

Use SET TERMINAL/NOECHO to prevent echoing the user input on the passowrd question.

Volker.

[Yyrkoon_]

I knew it should be easy.

It does work perfect.

Many thanks.

[Steven Schweda]

   If you haven't done it already, then you might wish to look at some
error handling ("ON ERROR" and/or "ON CONTROL_Y" -- See "HELP ON") to go
with that "SET TERMINAL [...]" action.  A carefree program combined with
a careless user can leave the user's terminal in a confusing state.

> I knew it should be easy.

   Everything's complicated.

> It does work perfect.

   Define "perfect".  You tried Ctrl/Y at your "password:" prompt?

[John Gillings]

Unfortunately this isn't easy from DCL. You need to deal with saving and restoring the terminal state and unexpected stuff in the typeahead buffer. The safest way is to write a program to do it. The attachment is a small MACRO32 program which will prompt SYS$COMMAND for a password with no echo or typeahead, and it's timed out after 20 seconds. The password text is returned as a local symbol "PASSWORD" and any errors in $STATUS.

Rename the file to GETPASSWORD.MAR then:

$ MACRO GETPASSWORD

$ LINK GETPASSWORD

$ RUN GETPASSWORD

Password:

$ SHOW SYMBOL PASSWORD

  PASSWORD = "secret"