Your tr'ing way is interesting fubaya. Honestly I have not heard of tr before. Anyway, that is just to protect the bash script itself, not the information produced by ps. The second way (which I thought of as well, by creating a complicated script to select the password that I want) does not help in case of ps either.

D.

---------- Post updated at 08:15 PM ---------- Previous update was at 08:12 PM ----------

shc is great, I just tried it and it works great for its purposes. Thanks for this information danmero, although again, it helps protecting the bash script, but the password still shows up when ps'ing.

D.

---------- Post updated at 08:23 PM ---------- Previous update was at 08:15 PM ----------

I am not sure if I miss something, but I am also using ssh without password in another box. Some points should be pointed out:

* This method needs some setups on clients (creat and copy ssh key etc...)
* This method needs passphrase each time a new shell is created on host (or first time user logs in), which is my case. Our remote host is a cluster, and each time I log on, a new shell is created.

The first point alone needs a lot of works, which is opposed to what I want to do: my program should be ready to run in any new client in the network without any complicated setup.

Thanks,

D.

---------- Post updated at 08:41 PM ---------- Previous update was at 08:23 PM ----------

I think of some solutions:

* fool ps so that the processes showed by ps'ing (xterm, bash... ) are something else (fake name) or without parameters (such as xterm, or expect or bash only)

* temporary disable ps (by chmod 500 `which ps` for example, which needs root privilege) or temporary link ps to a modified ps which does not show the processes I want to hide)

* encrypted password so that ps shows only weird characters on password fields (not sure if this is doable)

Google gave me some *change name or title of processes*, but it seems to me that those work only for the script, not the processes called by the script (like ssh, expect etc...)

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

D.