Question about reading input from terminal

[stevovo]

Ok I tried googling this but it's just so specific that I cant find anything

First, the background:

I read somewhere that typing stuff in the terminal (running everyday commands) gets stored somewhere. In other words, I have a truecrypt partition and I dont want to type the password in the terminal (ie. sudo truecrypt --mount /dev/sdb --password *mypassword*) cos it will be easily recovered, so I first run truecrypt and type it in there - all is fine.

Now the question:

I want to have a few truecrypt drives, but it is darn annoying having to keep typing in a long password each time. Is it possible to have for eg. 3 truecrypt drives with the same password, and then using a SCRIPT, read in the password once from the terminal into a variable or wherever and then execute the appropriate command once for each drive without compromising my password?

 

[concentricpuddle]

I think you're looking for expect. I haven't used it myself, but it seems like it'd take a bit of time to set it up...which might be offset by the number of times you'll use it in the future.

Anyway, here's a bash script that prompts you for your password (so it's not stored in the command history).

#!/bin/bash
read password
truecrypt --mount /dev/sdb --password $password #first drive
truecrypt --mount /dev/sdc --password $password #second drive etc.

 

[milomak]

there is a history of commands typed into the terminal and certainly nothing showing the password you typed in when prompted.

 

[stevovo]

there is a history of commands typed into the terminal and certainly nothing showing the password you typed in when prompted.

By prompt do you mean using the 'read' command in a script?

Just to clarify, so if I use for eg. the following script there wont be any traces of my password:

#!/bin/sh
echo -n "Enter password: "
read pass
truecrypt --mount /dev/sdb --password $pass

EDIT: oops, I think I missed your post there concentricpuddle. Thanks for the help

 

[MyWorld]

What milomak is trying to say is that your passwords are never stored anywhere on your system by some log file.

Your command history will be found in /root/.bash_history or ~/.bash_history .

If you view that file you will notice that no passwords are stored.

You can tinker with this file to allow it to hold history for a couple of days, indefinite or only a certain number of commands (measured by size of file, etc.)

 

[stevovo]

Thanks, I actually never knew where those commands were stored, now I know!

BTW this is off topic but does anyone know where the history is kept for files that are "double-clicked" like a video file for eg.?

 

[MyWorld]

That will be window manager specific, KDE stores it differently from Gnome, what DE/WM are you using?

 

[stevovo]

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