To Scott,

I have dreamed of such a function. Wonderful.


To mohanalakshmi,

Are you wanting to somehow encrypt the password and store it in a file? If so, you need to think of how you are going to mix it up and how you are going to reverse it. Maybe we can help with that, but you jhave to consider how you make the method secure. If someone can read the file and gets the string Krfmase7fjh!kwern and can read you code on how to reverse it, then the can manually follow the process. Even if you convert it to unprintable characters, then they could still use od to get the character codes and work from there.

If your decrypting script does something like this:-..... then the above is a problem. If your logic follows more that:-... then this may be better, however if you code continues by doing something obvious because the password check is confirmed, then if they can read your code, they can just do the same but exclude the password checking. Consider:-

Code:

read passwd?"What is the password? "
check_password $passwd
if [ $? = 0 ]      # True returned from check_password function for accepted password
then
   vi /data_dir/payroll_file
else
   echo "You are not authorised!"
fi

There is nothing to stop a user reading this and just running vi /data_dir/payroll_file

What are you actually trying to achieve?



Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK