[Rd] authentication support question

[Vincent Carey 525-2265]

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

> On Wed, 16 Mar 2005, Vincent Carey 525-2265 wrote:
>
> > I need to obtain username and password strings from the
> > user of a certain process running in R.  scan() can be used
> > to get the strings, but the password will be echoed back as the
> > user types it.  Is there any way to load keyboard input
> > to a variable without echoing the input back to the screen?
>
> Not from an arbitrary terminal.
>
> You haven't told us the OS, but e.g. on Unix-alikes with readline it is
> readline rather than R which is doing the echoing.
>
> I would us a dialog box for such things: graphapp has one which we use for
> proxy authentication under Windows.
>

Thanks; I am in a unix setting.  I have coded a C solution using
the getpass library function.  Interested users can contact me for
the source (which does not work (yet?) under windows as the getpass symbol
cannot be found by the default SHLIB actions.)