Show password characters when logging in to Linux

Solution 1:

I am not aware of any configuration to do this, if you REALLY want to do it you can achieve this by :
1 - modifying the getpass function in the getpass.c file in the glibc package.
2 - build libc-(VERSION).so
3 - backup the original lib/(your archcitecture)/libc.so ( say rename to libc-(VERSION).so.bak
4 - move the new file to lib/(your archcitecture)/ 5 - run ldconfig to update the cache
As an example you can replace the code that reads the password with a code that can look like this:

  /* Read the password. */
  // nread = __getline (&buf, &bufsize, in);

  int index=0;
  char c;
  while ( (c=getchar())!= EOF ){
     putch('*');
     buf[i]=c;
     ++i;
  }
  buf[i]='\0';
  nread=i;