askpass-fifo8mandos

Usage

Overview

This program reads a password from a FIFO and outputs it to standard output.

This program is not very useful on its own. This program is really meant to run as a plugin in the Mandos client-side system, where it is used as a fallback and alternative to retrieving passwords from a Mandos server.

This program is meant to be imitate a feature of the askpass program, so that programs written to interface with it can keep working under the Mandos system.

Options

This program takes no options.

Exit status

If exit status is 0, the output from the program is the password as it was read. Otherwise, if exit status is other than 0, the program was interrupted or encountered an error, and any output so far could be corrupt and/or truncated, and should therefore be ignored.

Files

/lib/cryptsetup/passfifo

Examples

Note that normally, this program will not be invoked directly, but instead started by the Mandos plugin-runner(8mandos).

This program takes no options.

askpass-fifo

Security

The only thing that could be considered worthy of note is this: This program is meant to be run by plugin-runner(8mandos), and will, when run standalone, outside, in a normal environment, immediately output on its standard output any presumably secret password it just received. Therefore, when running this program standalone (which should never normally be done), take care not to type in any real secret password by force of habit, since it would then immediately be shown as output.