current community

your communities

more stack exchange communities

Stack Exchange
tour help
Take the 2-minute tour ×
Unix & Linux Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems.. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 5 down vote favorite

I would like to know if there is a safe way to only be queried for a password once in a custom bash script, and then save it somehow to be used for later needs. At the end of the script it should be shredded in some way so it wont not recoverable from memory or in any other way.

share|improve this question
    
What exactly do you want to do? If you have to run several lines of your script as another user, you could simply call sudo and it would remember the password. If you're trying to authenticate to a database or similar it would be more complicated. Just tell us what you want to do. –  Andreas Wiese Apr 18 at 19:53
    
It is for access to a custom application which I need to do multiple times during the script, each time entering the password. I don't want to enter the password every time the script needs me to, and I don't want to save the password to an environmental variable or anything like that, unless it can be done in a safe way. I guess my use case is similar to authenticating to a database. –  user3207230 Apr 18 at 20:00

1 Answer 1

up vote 2 down vote

Use a gpg-agent and provide your password as:

__password=$(gpg --decrypt /path/to/password.gpg)

in your script.

Of course, you need to previously encrypt it:

$ echo "correct_horse_battery_staple" > password
$ gpg --encrypt password
share|improve this answer
1  
I'd suggest not to assign the password to a variable (you won't either, otherwise you hadn't suggested gpg-agent): variables in the environment of a process can be easily retrieved from outside the script. –  Andreas Wiese Apr 18 at 20:13
    
@AndreasWiese 1. This is a shell variable, not an environment variable. 2. Environment variables cannot be retrieved by other users on Linux or most other modern unices. –  Gilles Apr 18 at 22:09

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.