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Summary

We could either use the 'insults' option of sudo to produce something like this:

sudo echo 'hello'
Password:
It can only be attributed to human error.
Password:   

This will get them thinking about it :-). Or by adding something like:

passprompt="Password (not shown):"

to the 'Defaults' line in /etc/sudoers

Rationale

Users are used to see stars or bullets when entering their passwords. sudo however disables echoing of passwords. We should educate users about that, since this problem pops up quite often. Here are three support requests showing the demand for this spec: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+ticket/1945 https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+ticket/1421 https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+ticket/740

Use cases

Al got told to run a command using sudo in a terminal. He never used the command line before. As soon as entering the sudo command and pressing enter he thinks his computer just froze, because it does not react to input.

Scope

Design

Implementation

Change the default /etc/sudoers file to set a custom passpromt telling users that their password is not shown when typing it.

Code

Data preservation and migration

Unresolved issues

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec