16.9. getpass — Portable password input

Source code: Lib/getpass.py

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The getpass module provides two functions:

getpass.getpass(prompt='Password: ', stream=None)

Prompt the user for a password without echoing. The user is prompted using the string prompt, which defaults to 'Password: '. On Unix, the prompt is written to the file-like object stream using the replace error handler if needed. stream defaults to the controlling terminal (/dev/tty) or if that is unavailable to sys.stderr (this argument is ignored on Windows).

If echo free input is unavailable getpass() falls back to printing a warning message to stream and reading from sys.stdin and issuing a GetPassWarning.

Note

If you call getpass from within IDLE, the input may be done in the terminal you launched IDLE from rather than the idle window itself.

exception getpass.GetPassWarning

A UserWarning subclass issued when password input may be echoed.

getpass.getuser()

Return the “login name” of the user.

This function checks the environment variables LOGNAME, USER, LNAME and USERNAME, in order, and returns the value of the first one which is set to a non-empty string. If none are set, the login name from the password database is returned on systems which support the pwd module, otherwise, an exception is raised.

In general, this function should be preferred over os.getlogin().