Hide password in dmenu

Question

I'm new to dmenu. I'm trying to run programs which need sudo permission with dmenu. I've followed this link. So I have script ./dpass in my bin folder which says:

#!/bin/bash
dmenu -p "$1" <&- && echo

I've also run the command:

$ export SUDO_ASKPASS=/home/username/bin/dpass

So now I have a script in my bin folder called shutdown. It says:

#!/bin/bash
sudo -A shutdown -h now

When I try to run it through dmenu, it does ask me for my password, but the problem is that when I type the password the password is not hidden. I find this really insecure since anyone can see my password. Is there anyway to hide passwords in dmenu?

Answer 1

Try removing the && echo from the end of the call to dmenu:

#!/bin/bash
dmenu -p "$1" <&-

This should disable the echoing of what the user is typing into dmenu. This method is covered in this blog post titled: Enter passwords from dmenu.

excerpt

$ cat dpass
#! /bin/sh

# shellcheck disable=2046
caller="$(ps -o comm= -p $(ps -o ppid= -p $$))"
prompt="${1:-[$caller]}"
promptfg=black promptbg=red hidden=white
font="Liberation Sans-20:Bold"

dmenu -p "$prompt" -fn "$font" \
  -nf "$hidden" -nb "$hidden" -sf "$promptfg" -sb "$promptbg" <&-

1. It sets the prompt (red part) to the calling application, if no args were passed. So the user always gets a prompt of some kind.
2. It removes the trailing && echo statement, so it works on other password handlers.

Answer 2

Inspired by Fuseteam, I wrote a script called stprompt:

#!/bin/bash

prompt="$1"
answer=$(st -o "-" -g 100x5 -c st-prompt sh -c "echo -n '$prompt: '; read -s ANSWER; echo \$ANSWER")
echo "${answer#*: }" | tr -d '\r'

This script prompts the user, hides the input, and will output the response.

For your specific case, you could use this script in this manner:

sudopgm==$(echo "${options[@]}" | dmenu -i -p 'Programs that need sudo: ')
SUDO_ASKPASS=$(stprompt "sudo pass") sudo -A $sudopgm

There's more information about how I use stprompt in my dotfiles readme, and an example usage in my dmenu_ibmicmd script.

As Fuseteam said, st is a terminal. You can replace it with your favorite terminal.

Answer 3

a work around could be a script named say dterm that runs this:

#!/bin/bash
command="$@";st -- $command

that way when you run dterm sudo command it'll pop up a terminal for password input

as a added bonus you can also run any terminal application throught dmenu

p.s. st is a terminal it can be replace with any terminal that accepts the -e or -- argument

p.p.s this assumes you can execute your script through dmenu