Hide user input in Ruby

Question

I'm looking to read in data from the user, however, I do not want the input to show directly on the screen. Rather, I'd like to leave it blank or better yet, obfuscate characters to be input with an astericks.

For example:

print "Password: "
pass = STDIN.gets.chomp

Answer 1

Assuming you are using at least ruby 1.9, you can use the noecho method on IO: http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0/libdoc/io/console/rdoc/IO.html#method-i-noecho

So:

require 'io/console'
print "Password: "
STDIN.noecho(&:gets).chomp

This will not obfuscate the characters, but will simply leave the input terminal blank.