Correct stream for interactive in perl

Question

My perl script needs to ask the user for a password to download some files:

print "Your password please: \n";
ReadMode('noecho');
$password = ReadLine(0);
$password =~ s/\n//;
ReadMode(0);

system("wget --user=user --password=\"$password\" http://some.server/data.xml");
do_something();

If I call the script with $> ./script.pl everything works fine. But if I want to pipe the output to a file with $> ./script.pl > text.txt, the password question is piped to the file, too, and the ReadLine does not work any longer.

What is the right way to do this?

The easiest solution is probably to add `-O text.txt` to your `wget` command. — flesk, Jun 18 '12 at 06:31

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 18 '12 at 06:32

3

Print the prompt to STDERR:

print STDERR "Your password please: ";

answered Jun 18 '12 at 06:32

rob mayoff

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score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

0

The security gain from reading the password directly off the keyboard is nullified by shelling out to wget, in whose environment the password is plainly visible for every user on the system. If security does not matter, you can rewrite your program to take command-line parameters for the user/password.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

Community

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1

answered Jun 18 '12 at 08:24

daxim

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Correct stream for interactive in perl

2 Answers2