Bash - read password in script without displaying characters

In this short article, we would like to show how to read password in Bash without displaying characters in the terminal.

Quick solution:

#!/bin/bash

read -s -p "Password: " password

Where:

• -s prevents against typed characters displaying,
• -p "Password: " prints Password:  message,
• password is the name of the variable that will store the typed password.

Practical example

Paste the following code into your bash script (e.g. password.sh file).

#!/bin/bash

read -s -p "Password: " password
echo

if [ "$password" = 'secret_password' ]
then
	echo "User authenticated...";
else
	echo "Typed incorrect password!";
fi

read

Example result: