Question

All,

Our server is running Java 1.5 and I am having difficulty trying to mask user input from the command line. I am executing a jar file (java -jar my.jar) and am working through command line prompts via printlns. I cannot use Java Console.

Thanks

Answer 1

On a Unix system? You could try running the system program stty with argument -echo before reading the program and the program stty echo afterwards.

ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder("stty", "-echo");
pb.start().waitFor();
// Read the password here
pb = new ProcessBuilder("stty", "echo");
pb.start().waitFor();

Note that I have not tried this! Some stty programs are happy with it and some aren’t (those that aren’t need their stdin to come from /dev/tty to work right…)