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Comment by ibotty | Hacker News Reader

or easier and shorter:

   printf PaSSw0rd | sha1sum

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Or call shasum or sha1sum and input your password on stdin so your shell history doesn't contain your password in plain text.

Just pop a space at the beginning and it won't go into shell history.

It does for me

  >  echo test
  test
  > history
  ...
  6730   echo test
  6731  history

Set this in your .bashrc

  HISTCONTROL=ignorespace

Or even better, though unrelated to this topic... Also get it to ignore duplicates that come next to each other.

  HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:ignorespace

That's a bash-ism that's controlled by the $HISTCONTROL environment variable, not universally-applicable advice. $HISTCONTROL set to "ignorespace" or "ignoreboth" may or may not be the default, depending on your distribution.

Yeah already replied below specifying that - I was under the impression that it's default to on in most distros, but don't actually have a clue which do/don't.

it will still be in ps output for a short while...

Ultra paranoid. I like the way you think.

    python -c 'import hashlib; from getpass import getpass; s = hashlib.sha1(); s.update(getpass()); print s.hexdigest()'

how do you get rid of the carriage return as last char that way?

Use Ctrl-d to end input without hitting return and you shouldn't get a newline.

bash, at least, only handles Ctrl-d on its own line.

If you're not on a new line, you can type Ctrl-d twice.

What if my password contains % characters?

Yeah, note that this doesn't work with all password combinations. I just use the Python version above

  python -c 'import hashlib; print hashlib.sha1("reALpassWORD12%12").hexdigest()'

and then:

  history -d $((HISTCMD-2))

to delete the last entry in the bash history.

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