NAME

       password-prompt - Prompt for a password and output it.

SYNOPSIS

       password-prompt [--prefix PREFIX | -p PREFIX]
                       [--debug]

       password-prompt {--help | -?}

       password-prompt --usage

       password-prompt {--version | -V}

DESCRIPTION

       All password-prompt does is prompt for a password and output any given password to
       standard output.

       This program is not very useful on its own. This program is really meant to run as a
       plugin in the Mandos client-side system, where it is used as a fallback and alternative to
       retrieving passwords from a Mandos server.

       This program is little more than a getpass(3) wrapper, although actual use of that
       function is not guaranteed or implied.

OPTIONS

       This program is commonly not invoked from the command line; it is normally started by the
       Mandos plugin runner, see plugin-runner(8mandos). Any command line options this program
       accepts are therefore normally provided by the plugin runner, and not directly.

       --prefix=PREFIX, -p PREFIX
           Prefix string shown before the password prompt.

       --debug
           Enable debug mode. This will enable a lot of output to standard error about what the
           program is doing. The program will still perform all other functions normally.

       --help, -?
           Gives a help message about options and their meanings.

       --usage
           Gives a short usage message.

       --version, -V
           Prints the program version.

EXIT STATUS

       If exit status is 0, the output from the program is the password as it was read.
       Otherwise, if exit status is other than 0, the program has encountered an error, and any
       output so far could be corrupt and/or truncated, and should therefore be ignored.

ENVIRONMENT

       CRYPTTAB_SOURCE, CRYPTTAB_NAME
           If set, these environment variables will be assumed to contain the source device name
           and the target device mapper name, respectively, and will be shown as part of the
           prompt.

           These variables will normally be inherited from plugin-runner(8mandos), which will
           normally have inherited them from /scripts/local-top/cryptroot in the initial RAM disk
           environment, which will have set them from parsing kernel arguments and
           /conf/conf.d/cryptroot (also in the initial RAM disk environment), which in turn will
           have been created when the initial RAM disk image was created by
           /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/cryptroot, by extracting the information of the root
           file system from /etc/crypttab.

           This behavior is meant to exactly mirror the behavior of askpass, the default password
           prompter.

BUGS

       None are known at this time.

EXAMPLE

       Note that normally, command line options will not be given directly, but via options for
       the Mandos plugin-runner(8mandos).

       Normal invocation needs no options:

       password-prompt

       Show a prefix before the prompt; in this case, a host name. It might be useful to be
       reminded of which host needs a password, in case of KVM switches, etc.

       password-prompt --prefix=host.example.org:

       Run in debug mode.

       password-prompt --debug

SECURITY

       On its own, this program is very simple, and does not exactly present any security risks.
       The one thing that could be considered worthy of note is this: This program is meant to be
       run by plugin-runner(8mandos), and will, when run standalone, outside, in a normal
       environment, immediately output on its standard output any presumably secret password it
       just received. Therefore, when running this program standalone (which should never
       normally be done), take care not to type in any real secret password by force of habit,
       since it would then immediately be shown as output.

       To further alleviate any risk of being locked out of a system, the plugin-runner(8mandos)
       has a fallback mode which does the same thing as this program, only with less features.

SEE ALSO

       intro(8mandos) crypttab(5) mandos-client(8mandos) plugin-runner(8mandos),

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright © 2008-2009, 2011-2012 Teddy Hogeborn, Björn Påhlsson

       This manual page is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
       terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation,
       either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

       This manual page is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
       WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
       PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

       You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program.
       If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.