[Info-vax] VMS Features I Wish Linux Had

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-06-11 15:33, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 6/10/16 9:17 AM, John E. Malmberg wrote:
>> On 6/9/2016 10:37 PM, lawrencedo99 at gmail.com wrote:
>>>
>>> The other one is the terminal driver. My first impression of Unix
>>> was  what a crap terminal driver it had, that echoes everything as
>>  > soon as it’s typed. Seems like no other system has seen fit to
>>  > emulate the thoughtful VMS feature of not echoing anything until
>>  > it is actually being recognized as input to a program.
>>
>> Which can let text not intended to be echoed like passwords leak to the
>> terminal output.
>>
>
> Unix (and thus Linux) has built in method that prevents things like
> passwords from echoing.

You missed the point.
If you are expecting a password prompt, you might start typing in the 
password, only to realize that the program had not yet come to the point 
where it turns off echoing, and since the Unix terminal driver echoes 
things as you type them, and not when the program actually reads the 
data, you password is now visible on your screen.

VMS, on the other hand, do not echo anything before it is actually being 
read. So in the VMS scenario, you start typing the password even though 
the program have not yet turned off echoing. But nothing is being 
echoed, as nothing is reading that input yet. And when the password read 
is issued, the terminal echoing have been turned off, and so the input 
is not echoed.

I know that it is common for people not used to other solutions to have 
a hard time even understanding the problems. Easy to become blind to the 
problems when you are just so used to one world.

> Once again people pointing out non-existant weaknesses in Unix.  I
> wish people would take the time to actually learn about it before
> trying to criticize it.

No. This is a real problem. And it is not only passwords. You also get 
output messed up if output happens before the reading, such as a prompt, 
which then gets printed *after* the input instead of before if the user 
already started typing. This can cause all kind of confused screen content.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol