From: Dennis Newbold <dennisn@...>
Date: 2000-12-06T15:40:03+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:6843] how to do "noecho" gets from stdin?

Hi All,

     The reason I want to do this somewhat unusual thing is:  I'm doing
a Ruby program to automate
zipping up certain files on my hard drive, and saving them on a remote
system via ftp.  It all works
fine except that, for security reasons, I don't want to hard code the
password for the ftp login into
the script.  So, I had it emit a prompt to the user (me), and then do a
gets to read in the password.
This also works fine, except that the password I type in is echoed to
the screen.  Since I work in
an open office with two other guys, this is not really an ideal
situation.  If I were using the Unix
or Linux version of Ruby, I could do an ioctl against stdin to set its
properties to include "noecho".
Don't recall the details, but a few minutes reading through a few man
pages should clear it up.
Unfortunately, I'm on Windows NT, so that probably is not an option.
Any suggestions /
comments would be appreciated.  Thanks.

Dennis
dennisn@pe.net