Can I mask an input text in a bat file?

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Yes – I am 4 years late.

But I found a way to do this in one line without having to create an external script; by calling powershell commands from a batch file.

Thanks to TessellatingHeckler – without outputting to a text file (I set the powershell command in a variable, because it’s pretty messy in one long line inside a for loop).

@echo off
set "psCommand=powershell -Command "$pword = read-host 'Enter Password' -AsSecureString ; ^
    $BSTR=[System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::SecureStringToBSTR($pword); ^
        [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::PtrToStringAuto($BSTR)""
for /f "usebackq delims=" %%p in (`%psCommand%`) do set password=%%p
echo %password%

Originally I wrote it to output to a text file, then read from that text file. But the above method is better. In one extremely long, near incomprehensible line:

@echo off
powershell -Command $pword = read-host "Enter password" -AsSecureString ; $BSTR=[System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::SecureStringToBSTR($pword) ; [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::PtrToStringAuto($BSTR) > .tmp.txt & set /p password=<.tmp.txt & del .tmp.txt
echo %password%

I’ll break this down – you can split it up over a few lines using caret ^, which is much nicer…

@echo off
powershell -Command $pword = read-host "Enter password" -AsSecureString ; ^
    $BSTR=[System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::SecureStringToBSTR($pword) ; ^
        [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::PtrToStringAuto($BSTR) > .tmp.txt 
set /p password=<.tmp.txt & del .tmp.txt
echo %password%

This article explains what the powershell commands are doing; essentially it gets input using Read-Host -AsSecureString – the following two lines convert that secure string back into plain text, the output (plaintext password) is then sent to a text file using >.tmp.txt. That file is then read into a variable and deleted.

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