Question

I have spent several hours trying to find a means of writing a cross platform password prompt in php that hides the password that is input by the user. While this is easily accomplished in Unix environments through the use of stty -echo, I have tried various means of passthru() and system() calls to make windows do the same thing to no avail.

I have tried:

passthru('set /p pass=Password: '); system('echo %pass% > out.txt'); $pass = file_get_contents('out.txt', 'r'); 

This seems to hang on the passthru(‘set /p pass=Password: ‘); line without allowing me to input any text and must be killed with a Ctrl-c.

I have also tried various methods of fgetc and fgets and printing backspace characters to hide the input since this works in other languages. However, PHP does not appear to be able to interact with text prior to a carriage return.

I would really like to find a way to make this work, is this an impossible task or is this something that can be done?

Note that I am aware that I could wrap the php script in a batch file and pass the password as a command line argument, but that doesn’t work for me in this case.

Answer 1

Here’s a Windows solution, using the COM extension for PHP. I tested this on Windows XP with PHP 5.2.6.

<?php  $pwObj = new Com('ScriptPW.Password');  print 'Password: '; $passwd = $pwObj->getPassword();  echo 'Your password is $passwd\n';  ?>