Re: [Mingw-msys] Password reading

[Keith M. <kei...@to...>]

Jon Bright wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm not sure if this list or mingw-users is the more appropriate place 
> for this query - please let me know if I got it wrong.
> 
> I've done the Win32 port for monotone (http://venge.net/monotone), using 

> MinGW.  One of the things monotone needs to do is ask the user for a 
> password, which needs not to be echoed.  Implementing this for normal 
> windows command shells was easy (in fact, I found about 3 different ways 

> to make it work - I'm currently using SetConsoleMode to turn off 
> ENABLE_ECHO_INPUT).  Getting this to work in MSYS's rxvt appears to be 
> impossible.  Having tried lots and lots of different solutions, the only 

> way I found of doing this was to emit the vt100 sequences to set the 
> background color the same as the foreground color, which... is 
non-ideal.
> 
> Am I stupid?  What's the recommended way of doing this?

This is most likely a consequence of a long standing bug, which seems to
be very elusive and difficult to fix, in the ptty emulation employed by
MSYS rxvt.  Earnie, and others, have been searching for a solution for a
considerable time now, but none yet seems evident.

You can avoid this issue by disabling rxvt at MSYS start up, and run the
MSYS shell in a native Win32 console window -- use the -norxvt option in
your start up shortcut (for MSYS-1.0.10), or simply delete/rename the
rxvt.exe in your c:\msys\1.0\bin directory (or wherever else you put it,
when you installed MSYS).

HTH.

Keith.