Way to securely give a password to R application from the terminal?

Does R have a function that allows a user to provide a password securely, such as Python's getpass module?

(see http://docs.python.org/library/getpass.html for an example of what I mean)

Solution 1:

The problem is that R does not have functions to control the terminal it is running in (something like Rncurses); probably this is due to portability issues.
Some time ago I was struggling with the same problem and I ended up with a function using TclTk:

getPass<-function(){  
  require(tcltk);  
  wnd<-tktoplevel();tclVar("")->passVar;  
  #Label  
  tkgrid(tklabel(wnd,text="Enter password:"));  
  #Password box  
  tkgrid(tkentry(wnd,textvariable=passVar,show="*")->passBox);  
  #Hitting return will also submit password  
  tkbind(passBox,"<Return>",function() tkdestroy(wnd));  
  #OK button  
  tkgrid(tkbutton(wnd,text="OK",command=function() tkdestroy(wnd)));  
  #Wait for user to click OK  
  tkwait.window(wnd);  
  password<-tclvalue(passVar);  
  return(password);  
}  

Of course it won't work in non-GUI environments.

Solution 2:

Very simple linux concept for terminal secure password question:

   password <- function(prompt = "Password:"){
      cat(prompt)
      pass <- system('stty -echo && read ff && stty echo && echo $ff && ff=""',
                        intern=TRUE)
      cat('\n')
      invisible(pass)
   }        

Solution 3:

Per m-dz in the comments above, there is a now a package for doing this called getPass, which has a single function, getPass(). This is a replacement for base::readline().