Executing this program allows to prompt users in interactive CLI apps for passwords without it being printed in the terminal.

This should be easier, but it's unfortunately not possible to achieve with most higher level languages that do not offer an abstraction for it. Therefore instead of relying on popular cheap tricks using VBScript to fire up a prompt (which was never even working well since the password is shown in clear while the user types it in) I decided to build this from C sources I found on stackoverflow. Credits go to guestgulkan from cplusplus.com, whoever (s)he may be.

Get the build/hiddeninput.exe file into your project and execute it to accept user input. Whatever the user types until a newline will be output back to the caller but will not show up in the terminal.

hiddeninput.cpp is the original sources modified so that it compiles with VC2008 which allows the executable to run fine from Win XP onwards.

hiddeninput.c is an alternative version I worked on using the ancestral conio utilities. It is not completely functionally equivalent to the C version so I chose not to include the binary in the repo. Should you really have adverse reactions to running compiled C code, you can easily build this one yourself instead.

This is in the public domain as far as I am concerned. Should anyone involved in writing the original bits feel particularly sad or offended by my publishing of the sources or binary, drop me a line.