Hide password input on terminal

In the Linux world, masking isn’t usually done with asterisks, normally echoing is just turned off and the terminal displays blanks E.g. if you use su or log into a virtual terminal etc.

There is a library function to handle getting passwords, it won’t mask the password with asterisks but will disable echoing of the password to terminal. I pulled this out of a linux book I have. I believe its part of the posix standard

#include <unistd.h>
char *getpass(const char *prompt);

/*Returns pointer to statically allocated input password string
on success, or NULL on error*/

The getpass() function first disables echoing and all processing of
terminal special characters (such as the interrupt character, normally
Control-C).

It then prints the string pointed to by prompt, and reads a line of
input, returning the null-terminated input string with the trailing
newline stripped, as its function result.

A google search for getpass() has a reference to the GNU implementation (should be in most linux distros) and some sample code for implementing your own if need be

http://www.gnu.org/s/hello/manual/libc/getpass.html

Their example for rolling your own:

#include <termios.h>
#include <stdio.h>

ssize_t
my_getpass (char **lineptr, size_t *n, FILE *stream)
{
    struct termios old, new;
    int nread;

    /* Turn echoing off and fail if we can't. */
    if (tcgetattr (fileno (stream), &old) != 0)
        return -1;
    new = old;
    new.c_lflag &= ~ECHO;
    if (tcsetattr (fileno (stream), TCSAFLUSH, &new) != 0)
        return -1;

    /* Read the password. */
    nread = getline (lineptr, n, stream);

    /* Restore terminal. */
    (void) tcsetattr (fileno (stream), TCSAFLUSH, &old);

    return nread;
}

If need be you could use this as the basis as modify it to display asterisks.