How to Input Password in Shell Script as Hidden Characters

How to Use:-

If you want to take input of password in shell script. You must want to not to show any character on-screen entered by user. Use -s for silent mode. Using -s input characters are not echoed. For example create a shell script named inputpwd.sh and add following content.

$ vim inputpwd.sh

#!/bin/bash

### Input password as hidden charactors ### 
read -s -p "Enter Password: "  pswd

### Print the value of pswd variable ### 
echo -e "\nYour password is: " $pswd

Let’s execute the script and enter your password, You just enter your password, characters will not display on-screen. This will work with /bin/bash shell only, older shell (/bin/sh) will throw an error.

# chmod +x inputpwd.sh
# ./inputpwd.sh

Enter Password:
Your password is:  9kjdfk329sksk