[wplug] ssh - reading password from stdin?

[Kuzman Ganchev]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 01:09:42AM -0400, Timothy Wong wrote:
> Does anybody know if there is a way to force ssh (or telnet) to read the
> user's password from STDIN?  I would like to do this so that I can open an
> instance of ssh from perl a la "open (SSH, "| ssh myhost.com -l
> username")" and then using perl's print to control the ssh session.

Sounds like what you want is ssh-agent(1). I think that ssh is pretty
picky about taking passwords from what it thinks isn't a human,
because storing passwords is a bad idea[1]. If you want this to run
from cron or similar then use a null passphrase key, rather than
storing the password in a file -- it's not less secure. 

I know system that uses this to transmit /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow
to client machines. 

> Another issue that presents itself is how to read from this instance of
> SSH...I can write to it, but I can't specify two pipes in the open
> statement...can I?

Apparently not. From perlfunc:

  If the filename begins with '|', the filename is interpreted as a
  command to which output is to be piped, and if the filename ends with
  a '|', the filename is interpreted as a command which pipes output to
  us. See Using open() for IPC in the perlipc manpage for more examples
  of this. (You are not allowed to open to a command that pipes both in
  and out, but see the IPC::Open2 manpage, the IPC::Open3 manpage, and
  Bidirectional Communication with Another Process in the perlipc
  manpage for alternatives.)

I didn't read the perlipc manual. 

Kuzman