Hide keyboard input

[James T. Dennis]

Alexei Kichkine <ax at infocentr.ru> wrote:

> Carsten Gaebler wrote:

>> Hi!

>> I'm writing a program that is to be exectued via inetd and prompts for a
>> password. To read the password I'm using sys.stdin.readline() which has
>> the disadvantage that the password is printed on the screen while being
>> typed in. I tried getpass.getpass() to hide it but it raises an
>> exception (seems it's looking for some kind of terminal):

> If you use inetd you cannot manage the terminal..
> Best regards, YAnother

	Hmm.  Is there some way you could use in.telnetd
 	(perhaps with the -p option to specify an alternative
	"login" program)?  I guess you could have a small
 	C wrapper that would perform any authentication and
	sanity checks; then exec your Python script.  At
	that point you should have a properly allocated and
	inititialized pty (psuedo-terminal) and all of the 
	usual ncurses/curses and other terminal control
	functions should work.

	(It seems that -p is accepted in the BSD and Linux
	versions of telnetd --- I don't know about *nixen).