Question

What do I need to do for code in Bash, if I want to echo *s in place of password characters (or even just hide the characters completely) when the user types something in using read?

Answer 1

As Mark Rushakoff pointed out, read -s will suppress the echoing of characters typed at the prompt. You can make use of that feature as part of this script to echo asterisks for each character typed:

#!/bin/bash
unset password
prompt="Enter Password:"
while IFS= read -p "$prompt" -r -s -n 1 char
do
    if [[ $char == $'\0' ]]
    then
        break
    fi
    prompt='*'
    password+="$char"
done
echo
echo "Done. Password=$password"