Password entry

[goodvikings]

I'm starting on writing a simple login program, and straight off I don't know how to make it so when the user enters in the password nothing appears (or asterisks). If I had to guess, I would think it is simply a flag that you set for the istream, but I'm not sure and haven't found anything

Any help would be appreciated.

[jsmith]

If you are using UNIX (I assume based on the forum), you should turn off character echo
in the terminal. Use tcsetattr to turn off the ECHO flag. Here's a sample program I wrote
years ago.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <termios.h>

int main()
{
    struct termios oldSettings, newSettings;

    tcgetattr( fileno( stdin ), &oldSettings );
    newSettings = oldSettings;
    newSettings.c_lflag &= (~ICANON & ~ECHO);
    tcsetattr( fileno( stdin ), TCSANOW, &newSettings );

    while ( 1 )
    {
        fd_set set;
        struct timeval tv;

        tv.tv_sec = 10;
        tv.tv_usec = 0;

        FD_ZERO( &set );
        FD_SET( fileno( stdin ), &set );

        int res = select( fileno( stdin )+1, &set, NULL, NULL, &tv );

        if( res > 0 )
        {
            char c;
            printf( "Input available\n" );
            read( fileno( stdin ), &c, 1 );
        }
        else if( res < 0 )
        {
            perror( "select error" );
            break;
        }
        else
        {
            printf( "Select timeout\n" );
        }
    }

    tcsetattr( fileno( stdin ), TCSANOW, &oldSettings );
    return 0;
}

[goodvikings]

Cheers man, that was really helpful!

I've spent the hours since posting that looking at the conio and curses headers, and none of them are doing what I want.

Thanks again!