[Python-Dev] [OT] Re: getpass and stdin

[Shaya Potter]

Leif Walsh wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 2:14 PM, Shaya Potter <spotter at cs.columbia.edu> wrote:
>> 1) I am willing to type in the password, which is obvious to anyone who
>> can read a simple script.  That just doesn't work for a program you want
>> to run in the background to type it in every time.
> 
> I recommend you just hack on this getmail program and give it a daemon
> mode.  That shouldn't be too large of a task, and it will certainly be
> more secure (and you can even commit your changes as a new feature!).
> Otherwise, your best bet is probably, as Charles said, making the
> passfile work for you (maybe play with nfs and see if you can get it
> to hide things...I'm no wizard with it, but I'm willing to bet it's
> possible).

I don't disagree (though nfs will never work, think root exploit on 
another machine, squash_root doesn't help).  I wasn't posting here about 
how to change getmail (I can make those changes easily), the issue was 
simply understanding python's getpass().  Which you answered my question 
on, so thank you.