One Hundred Papercuts

No stars or dots when entering a password in textmode, terminal (sudo)

Bug #488769 reported by Philipp Gassmann
10
This bug affects 1 person
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One Hundred Papercuts
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Bug Description

For newbies it's quite confusing, when you have to enter your sudo pw in a terminal and see no confirmation that you write something. The Terminal should display stars or dots as in grafical pw prompts

Not only useful for newbies, recently i had a problem with the graphic card driver and was in Textmode. Because of a problem with the driver or whatever, not every keystroke was accepted. I had to log in in text mode. for the username, I saw the characters, so i could retype a char if the keystroke wasn't accepted, but when entering the pw i had a real problem.
I don't remember how i solved it, perhaps a reboot did it.

Philipp Gassmann (phiphi.g)
summary: - No stars or dots when entering a password in a terminal (sudo)
+ No stars or dots when entering a password in textmode, terminal (sudo)
Revision history for this message
Zubin Mithra (zubin-mithra) wrote :

well, couldnt this be implemented in the following manner:-

$ sudo -z

could mean that stars need to be displayed as the password is typed.

In terms of modifying the sudo package, we could add a feature whereby a simple call to a slightly modified getchar() could be made(which modifies "struct termios" values) and stars could be displayed when the password is typed.

is`nt this feasible?

Revision history for this message
Tm_T (Jussi Kekkonen) (tmt) wrote :

I believe this should be consistent in everywhere where password is asked in default "normal" use, wether it's with GUI or CLI

Revision history for this message
Zubin Mithra (zubin-mithra) wrote :

Jussi : you mean displaying the number of characters in a password should be enabled for default use.
maybe we could add a provision for easy configuration of that too.

Revision history for this message
Arvind S Raj (arvindsraj-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

Jussi: GUI do you mean gksudo? In that circles are displayed. Only in the command line stars not displayed.

Yeah why not like what Zubin suggested, the feature could be implemented by use of an extra option could enable the display of stars for those new to linux. All those who don't want the number of characters to be displayed can avoid the option.

But well most new users would just type in sudo since that's what most guides all over the internet say. So the default command should actually display stars and with the switch it shouldn't display stars.

Revision history for this message
Vish (vish) wrote :

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 194472, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Please continue to report any other bugs you may find.

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