ask

A Golang library for prompting a user for passwords and such.

Reading from stdin and writing to stdout interferes with a user's ability to pipe data into or out of a program. This is most evident when doing things such as prompting a user for a password.

For example, given a program which requests a password from a user and then proceeds to read the remainder of stdin as input. If the user then pipes a file into the program, the first line is read as the password rather than the user being given an opportunity to enter the correct password.

Instead, this library interacts with the user directly, allowing the user to be prompted and respond without interfering with stdin or stdout.

Use judiciously. While it may be tempting to use this as the only input method for a program, this precludes a user from automating input.

Usage

ask.Ask gets input from the user normally, while ask.HiddenAsk prevents echoing of the user's input. ask.Print is also available to compliment the ask.Ask* variants.

import (
  "github.com/miquella/ask"
)

func getPassword() (string, error) {
    err := ask.Print("Warning! I am about to ask you for a password!\n")
    if err != nil {
        return "", err
    }

    return ask.HiddenAsk("Password: ")
}