Comment by wpm
6 months ago
So, the article says that sudo hid the password by default because of shared terminals and so on.
I would've thought it would've been a simple carry over from before terminals were glass. Like, yeah, I get up from a glass terminal and someone else goes to use it, but wouldn't the scrollback be cleared when I log out? But silent logins from before glass terminals makes a ton of sense; it would literally print your typed characters on a real, physical medium. having
login: cool_user
password: hunter2
sitting on a printout in a trash can? Yeah, obvious security issue.
I dunno, I take them at their word but if you had asked me why password prompts in the terminal don't echo, I would've guessed it was a carry-over from the days of real teletype terminals.
Not just that. There's no escape sequence to tell a terminal to draw every character input as something else and if there was, it may not have worked across all the different terminals out there.
I suppose you could do character buffering and quickly change to normal, print an asterisk, and back to silent mode in one write. But likely there's always some kind of edge case where things work differently. It's not difficult to disable so this may be better for the 99% and the 1% can change it back.