How to Show Enter Password in the Form of Asterisks(*) on Terminal

how to show enter password in the form of Asterisks(*) on terminal

The solution to this is platform-specific, unfortunately.

On Linux or BSD, you can use the readpassphrase function (there is also getpass, though it suffers from not allowing the buffer and buffer size to be provided by the caller. The documentation for the GNU Lib C (link broken? try this alternative instead) library also provides an excellent guide on how to implement this yourself in terms of the lower level termios primitives, which you can use on other UNIX implementations in lieue of getpass).

On Windows, you can use SetConsoleMode to disable the default echoing behavior (and thus echo your own characters such as the asterisk). You could then use SetConsoleMode to restore the echoing.

I should add, however, that this is a very poor form of authentication as it involves yet more passwords which are the bane of every user's existence (and not particularly secure, either). A better approach is to start a webserver in your application and output the URL on which the user should authenticate. The advantage to this approach is that, when the user navigates to this URL, that URL can then support delegated login to third party identity providers such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Even if you don't support third party identity providers, this approach comes with other benefits; if you have other web-based tools, this approach reduces the number of times that the user must authenticate (since the commandline tool and web based tools will share the same browser session) and allows you to implement the login flow only once, this approach also mitigates phishing risks (users can plainly see the host in the browser when they enter their credentials compared to entering credentials on the commandline where it is much easier to spoof a prompt, and if you only redirect to localhost at the last step but do the majority of the logic on a remote host this approach also allows updates to the authorization flow to be deployed independently of the client commandline application which has important security benefits. That being said, a web based login such as this is not always the right approach. It is also worth looking into alternative authentication mechanisms such as libpam (under libpam, you would use the function pam_authenticate to authenticate the user rather than taking the password as input directly). It's worth investing some research to determine the best mechanism for your particular use case.

How do I convert a password into asterisks while it is being entered?

If you want a solution that works on Windows/macOS/Linux and on Python 2 & 3, you can install the pwinput module (formerly called stdiomask):

pip install pwinput

Unlike getpass.getpass() (which is in the Python Standard Library), the pwinput module can display *** mask characters as you type. It is also cross-platform, while getpass is Linux and macOS only.

Example usage:

>>> pwinput.pwinput()
Password: *********
'swordfish'
>>> pwinput.pwinput(mask='X') # Change the mask character.
Password: XXXXXXXXX
'swordfish'
>>> pwinput.pwinput(prompt='PW: ', mask='*') # Change the prompt.
PW: *********
'swordfish'
>>> pwinput.pwinput(mask='') # Don't display anything.
Password:
'swordfish'

Unfortunately this module, like Python's built-in getpass module, doesn't work in IDLE or Jupyter Notebook.

More details at https://pypi.org/project/pwinput/

How do I echo stars (*) when reading password with `read`?

As Mark Rushakoff pointed out, read -s will suppress the echoing of characters typed at the prompt. You can make use of that feature as part of this script to echo asterisks for each character typed:

#!/bin/bash
unset password
prompt="Enter Password:"
while IFS= read -p "$prompt" -r -s -n 1 char
do
    if [[ $char == $'\0' ]]
    then
        break
    fi
    prompt='*'
    password+="$char"
done
echo
echo "Done. Password=$password"

How to display asterisk for input password in C++ using CLion

Maybe

#include <conio.h>

int main()
{
    char s[10] = { 0 };
    int i;
    for (i = 0; i < 10;i++) {
        s[i] = _getch(); _putch('*');
        if (s[i] == 13) break;
    };
    printf("\nYour pass is %s", s);
    getchar();
    return 0;
}

Masking user input in python with asterisks

Depending on the OS, how you get a single character from user input and how to check for the carriage return will be different.

See this post: Python read a single character from the user

On OSX, for example, you could so something like this:

import sys, tty, termios

def getch():
    fd = sys.stdin.fileno()
    old_settings = termios.tcgetattr(fd)
    try:
        tty.setraw(sys.stdin.fileno())
        ch = sys.stdin.read(1)
    finally:
        termios.tcsetattr(fd, termios.TCSADRAIN, old_settings)
    return ch

key = ""
sys.stdout.write('Password :: ')
while True:
    ch = getch()
    if ch == '\r':
        break
    key += ch
    sys.stdout.write('*')
print
print key

How to display asterisk for input in Java?

Something like this:

import java.io.*;

public class Test {
    public static void main(final String[] args) {
        String password = PasswordField.readPassword("Enter password:");
        System.out.println("Password entered was:" + password);
    }
}

class PasswordField {

   public static String readPassword (String prompt) {
      EraserThread et = new EraserThread(prompt);
      Thread mask = new Thread(et);
      mask.start();

      BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
      String password = "";

      try {
          password = in.readLine();
      } catch (IOException ioe) {
          ioe.printStackTrace();
      }
      et.stopMasking();
      return password;
   }
}   

class EraserThread implements Runnable {
   private boolean stop;

   public EraserThread(String prompt) {
       System.out.print(prompt);
   }

   public void run () {
      while (!stop){
         System.out.print("\010*");
         try {
            Thread.currentThread().sleep(1);
         } catch(InterruptedException ie) {
            ie.printStackTrace();
         }
      }
   }

   public void stopMasking() {
      this.stop = true;
   }
}

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