Pipe Password to Application When Asked in Bash

bashcurlpasswordpipestdin

The following should be done in a bash script:

curl --digest --user schmijos https://bitbucket.org/u/p/get/tip.zip -o tip.zip

How can I automatically submit a password to curl when it asks for it? Since I don't want to see the password in any logfile, I won't do the following:

curl --digest --user schmijos:$password https://bitbucket.org/u/p/get/tip.zip -o tip.zip

Best Answer

Use empty:

With the password safely stored (it's a way of saying...)

$ echo password > pwd-file

Start process with empty. (You would omit -L log in the real case.)

$ empty -f -i fifo1 -o fifo2 -L log curl -u user http://example.com

Send the contents of pwd-file to empty's input pipe, which the process sees as both its stdin and /dev/tty.

$ empty -s -c -o fifo1 < pwd-file

This is what happened in the pseudo terminal:

$ cat log
<<<Enter host password for user 'user':>>>password
<<<

Related Solutions

Bash – Switch user in a shell script without entering the password

sudo also allows NOPASSWD on specific entries in the /etc/sudoers configuration, if you can get to that. Like:

userA ALL = (userB) NOPASSWD: ALL

This will give userA full access to userB without password. Should probably only be used if userA can be trusted to lock his screen whenever leaving it …

Alternatively, you can give userA access to only certain scripts. For instance:

userA ALL = (userB) NOPASSWD: /home/userB/scripts-for-userA/

This lets userA run any command in the directory /home/userB/scripts-for-userA/ as userB. It's still only as secure as those commands are, though.

Bash – How to add a password to a BASH script

The best kind of approach here is to do something like:

mysqldump --defaults-extra-file=/path/to/auth.cnf ...

Where auth.cnf looks like:

[client]
user=the-user
password=the-password

Then make sure the file is only readable by whomever is meant to run that script. The script itself can be world readable.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Switch user in a shell script without entering the password

Bash – How to add a password to a BASH script

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