Any method to mask the password that the user entered?

I am a college student and i received an assignment last week. I think i am able to complete the assignment but in the password section, i think my program will be better if the password that the user entered will be masked by my program. My program needs the user to enter their IDs and passwords through the keyboard. My idea is : Any method to mask the password while the user is typing the password ? I afraid that someone will not understand my question... I mean if i press "9" on the keyboard then the "9" will appears on the monitor, but now i want to mask the "9" with anything such as the asterisk "*". Any suggestions ? Please mail to me [email protected] if you have any idea.

You can use a function to read the string that doesn't display the char on the screen and then echo a '*'

Code:

---

#include <stdio.h>
#include <conio.h>

int main()
{
        char password[100];
        int i=0;

        do
        {
                password[i]=getch();
                printf("*");
                i++;
        }
        while(password[i-1]!='\r');
        password[i-1]='\0';//remove the newline
        printf("\n\n%s",password);
        return 0;
}

---

hope it helps

If you're under *nix, you could try using readline(), although this might not be allowed.

Cannot be done with ANSI C. Check your compiler's BIOS functions, or keyboard functions. Basically, you want to just capture their key-presses. If you want to print something, say, asteriks, then you'll just have to add that to your function. Remember that by just capturing key-presses, you'll have to have special cases for <ENTER> and <BACKSPACE>