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Welcome to the askpass.sh wiki!

For a discussion of askpass helper scripts see https://www.ict.griffith.edu.au/anthony/info/crypto/passwd_input.txt

For a different but similar version, to compare this against (developed from previous link) see http://www.ict.griffith.edu.au/anthony/software/#ask_password_stars

For example one difference, is that characters are handled using character codes, rather than trying to include control characters directly into the shell script! Also it tries to be more universal, avoiding things which may not work on older systems like Solaris (Sun Microsystems, no Oracle), and possibly MacOSX.

On the other hand this script outputs random number of character on screen for each letter typed, though only deletes one letter on character deletion.

Latest version also falls back to using "systemd-ask-password" if it is available, and provides options to 'cache' the password so the user does not need to re-type the password if the same one is asked for again. This is useful for editing encrypted files. For an example of use see the "encrypt" script in the last link, which includes comments on how to use that script in vim for editing password encrypted files.