[Rd] authentication support question

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005, Vincent Carey 525-2265 wrote:

> I need to obtain username and password strings from the
> user of a certain process running in R.  scan() can be used
> to get the strings, but the password will be echoed back as the
> user types it.  Is there any way to load keyboard input
> to a variable without echoing the input back to the screen?

Not from an arbitrary terminal.

You haven't told us the OS, but e.g. on Unix-alikes with readline it is 
readline rather than R which is doing the echoing.

I would us a dialog box for such things: graphapp has one which we use for 
proxy authentication under Windows.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595