PROMPT(1)PROMPT(1)NAME
prompt - give any program command-line editing facilities
SYNOPSIS
prompt
DESCRIPTION
prompt is a simple wrapper which provides command-line editing for programs that do not have it.
Not all programs with a command line interface provide an input history or even the ability to use the cursor keys to change the input. The
prompt program wraps any program, intercepting stdin, stdout and stderr and providing the user with such editing facilities.
SEE ALSO modglue(1). ptywrap(1).
See the web page at http://www.aei.mpg.de/~peekas/modglue/ for more information.
AUTHORS
Kasper Peeters <kasper.peeters@aei.mpg.de>
Jul 12, 2008 PROMPT(1)
Check Out this Related Man Page
PASSWORD-PROMPT(8mandos) Mandos Manual PASSWORD-PROMPT(8mandos)NAME
password-prompt - Prompt for a password and output it.
SYNOPSIS
password-prompt [--prefix PREFIX | -p PREFIX]
[--debug]
password-prompt {--help | -?}
password-prompt --usage
password-prompt {--version | -V}
DESCRIPTION
All password-prompt does is prompt for a password and output any given password to standard output.
This program is not very useful on its own. This program is really meant to run as a plugin in the Mandos client-side system, where it is
used as a fallback and alternative to retrieving passwords from a Mandos server.
This program is little more than a getpass(3) wrapper, although actual use of that function is not guaranteed or implied.
OPTIONS
This program is commonly not invoked from the command line; it is normally started by the Mandos plugin runner, see plugin-runner(8mandos).
Any command line options this program accepts are therefore normally provided by the plugin runner, and not directly.
--prefix=PREFIX, -p PREFIX
Prefix string shown before the password prompt.
--debug
Enable debug mode. This will enable a lot of output to standard error about what the program is doing. The program will still perform
all other functions normally.
--help, -?
Gives a help message about options and their meanings.
--usage
Gives a short usage message.
--version, -V
Prints the program version.
EXIT STATUS
If exit status is 0, the output from the program is the password as it was read. Otherwise, if exit status is other than 0, the program has
encountered an error, and any output so far could be corrupt and/or truncated, and should therefore be ignored.
ENVIRONMENT
CRYPTTAB_SOURCE, CRYPTTAB_NAME
If set, these environment variables will be assumed to contain the source device name and the target device mapper name, respectively,
and will be shown as part of the prompt.
These variables will normally be inherited from plugin-runner(8mandos), which will normally have inherited them from
/scripts/local-top/cryptroot in the initial RAM disk environment, which will have set them from parsing kernel arguments and
/conf/conf.d/cryptroot (also in the initial RAM disk environment), which in turn will have been created when the initial RAM disk image
was created by /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/cryptroot, by extracting the information of the root file system from /etc/crypttab.
This behavior is meant to exactly mirror the behavior of askpass, the default password prompter.
BUGS
None are known at this time.
EXAMPLE
Note that normally, command line options will not be given directly, but via options for the Mandos plugin-runner(8mandos).
Normal invocation needs no options:
password-prompt
Show a prefix before the prompt; in this case, a host name. It might be useful to be reminded of which host needs a password, in case of
KVM switches, etc.
password-prompt --prefix=host.example.org:
Run in debug mode.
password-prompt --debug
SECURITY
On its own, this program is very simple, and does not exactly present any security risks. The one thing that could be considered worthy of
note is this: This program is meant to be run by plugin-runner(8mandos), and will, when run standalone, outside, in a normal environment,
immediately output on its standard output any presumably secret password it just received. Therefore, when running this program standalone
(which should never normally be done), take care not to type in any real secret password by force of habit, since it would then immediately
be shown as output.
To further alleviate any risk of being locked out of a system, the plugin-runner(8mandos) has a fallback mode which does the same thing as
this program, only with less features.
SEE ALSO intro(8mandos)crypttab(5)mandos-client(8mandos)plugin-runner(8mandos),
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2008-2009, 2011-2012 Teddy Hogeborn, Bjorn Pahlsson
This manual page is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This manual page is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
Mandos 1.5.5 2012-01-01 PASSWORD-PROMPT(8mandos)