[R] Remove entry with sensitive information from history

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 27/05/2015 09:17, Luca Cerone wrote:
> Hi David, thanks, but the function has to work from an R shell, I have
> no graphical server in my remote machines.

My suggestion was going to be to use readline() to read the passwords. 
Ideally one would use a custom reader from stdin which did not echo, but 
that is not possible without knowledge of the terminal/console in use 
(which is hard to do portably), nor in general.  One could do what some 
password readers (e.g. that on iOS) do, and after each character is 
entered backspace and overwrite by x or dot.

>
> On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 9:45 AM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> On May 27, 2015, at 12:29 AM, Luca Cerone wrote:
>>
>>> Hi everybody,
>>>
>>> in one of my packages I store encrypted password.
>>>
>>> If the user has to change the password in use she can run:
>>>
>>> update_password(old_password, new_password)
>>>
>>> The problem is that the commands ends up in the .Rhistory file.
>>>
>>> Is there any way I can avoid this? Any suggestion about it?
>>>
>>
>> Write a small password verification program in Rcpp or tcl and then call it to handle the dialog. In the past Greg Snow has suggested: "The tkexamp function in the TeachingDemos package can help with creating tcltk dialog boxes. "
>>
>> --
>>
>> David Winsemius
>> Alameda, CA, USA
>>
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK