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Comment by aftbit | Hacker News Reader

I do something like this surprisingly often when dealing with iDRAC/IPMI/etc:

    sleep 3; xdotool type "abc123"

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When I was doing that a lot I just patched my VNC client to send the keys for the data in the clipboard on "paste" so I could use its native "paste" command

.. and now the password is stored unencrypted in your bash history.

That's a feature, not a bug. :P

Alright if you prefer:

    read PW; sleep 3; xdotool type "$PW"

Or if it's already on your clipboard:

    sleep 3; xdotool type "$(xclip -o)"

Use the `read` method the other poster said, or ensure HISTCONTROL is set and then prepend a space to commands that contain secrets.

  $ export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
  $  echo 'supersecret' | whatever

Prefix any command with a space and bash won't append to the history.

Careful that's only true if you set HISTCONTROL to "ignorespace" or "ignoreboth".

Which seems the default in my anecdotal experience on debian/Ubuntu.

It is also the default on fish shell in the same anecdotal experience.

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