hi guys,

i'll start by prefacing my question that it is specific to an OSX version of bash if that makes any difference or not I don't know.

from the command line in an OSX terminal i want to issue a command that requires a sudo password, and lets say my sudo password is "abc&123"

sudo options command

gets me back a line with a little key on the far right side prompting me to enter my password. when i do it doesn't read my full password as abc&123 it splits my password at the & and then it doesn't accept the sudo command.

if i change my password to "abcand123" the sudo command works just fine and the command is executed

question: how can i tell osx to ignore the & character as a "special character" when it's part of my password. i know the easy fix is to just use "abcand123" password, but to help prevent hacking, I'd like to keep my password as complicated as possible and use "special characters" in it.

btw, I have tried to google this but I can't seem to find an answer there.

thanks!

Todd

Well, it all depends on how you are feeding it/redirecting it,.. but a possibliity is to escape the & with a slash \:

Storing passwords in scripts and commands like this is a terrible and insecure idea though. Just FYI.

I think to OP is saying they type "sudo command" and get prompted for the password but it is not accepting the password

---------------------
Just tested on my Mac and it doesn't seem to have an issue with the & symbol for me

atjurhs if you can provide more information about what you are trying to do, I can perform a more specific test

I think whichever the case may be, szboardstretcher at least has it correct in pointing out that some form of escape needs to be used. Either the backslash, putting the password within quotes, single or double. It depends what the OSX accepts for escape characters, likely the backslash or at least this is what a google search tells me.

Wonder how it originally accepted the password?

Some oddity of languages or how OSX works? https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1641119?tstart=0

That's from 8 years ago. Is this really, honestly, still a bug/problem in Apple? Amazing!

They should take a page from Unix where this was figured out in the 1970s. Almost 45 years ago.

I wonder if the command you are running might be a poorly-written shell script which tries to feed your sudo password to some other script without quoting or escaping the password, thereby creating a broken command somewhere in its guts.

For example, the mysql command lets you specify a password on the command line when calling a command. This is not recommended if you are typing commands in a terminal because the password might end up in your .bash_history file, which stores all the commands you enter. However, I recently wrote a script that prompts the user for their database password and then formulates mysql commands using that password. My script is "poorly written" in that it suffers from the very problem I'm trying to describe. I.e., assuming your password is abc&123 then my script constructs a mysql command that looks something like this:
If I enter a password that contains an ampersand, then that ampersand might actually get interpreted by the command line as a BASH operator that says "run this process in the background" or something like that. I'm not sure at all, but the command would be broken into these two commands
The first command would be executed in the background and would be rejected by mysql as an improperly formulated command. The second would fail with a "123: command not found" or something.

I could be wrong.

Dillusionist, that is exactly what I'm saying

sneakyimp, as far as i can tell, that's exactly what is happening

If you could edit the script you are executing, you could add quotes around the password any time it gets fed into some attempt to formulate a command. That might fix the ampersand problem but would not fix the problem if your password contains a quote in it. You could also change your password

If you didn't write the script, you should give a but report to whoever did.

next problem...

how do i modify my .bash file in osx?

in linux i would simple enter the command texedit .bash from my home directory

if i try open -e .bash from my home directory it says that file does not exist, if i try the same command with .bashrc i get the same answer does not exist.

when i try to ls .* it also does not list a .bash or .bashrc file

where else could my .bash file be located, or what else am i doing wrong?

i want to set up some aliases like:

up = 'cd ..'
ll = 'ls -alhf'

and others.

My guess is that you are not actually running BASH on your OSX machine. Also curious why you are editing this file as it doesn't sound like that's where the problem lies.

Some searching yields:

thanks sneakyimp!

i forgot to include the -a in my ls comand

actually that's one reason why (on my linux box at work) i have an alias ll = 'ls -alhf' and then i never type ls i just always type ll so i don't forget all the options...

well creating a .bash_profile or just a .profile in osx, osx does appear to apply the command when opening a new terminal, however i get lots of errors

note, it is a bash shell because the is a .bash_history file and a .bash_sessions directory


can someone reccommend an osx specific forum like linux questions, or is there a osx specific forum here, i haven't found one

After making changes to your .profile or .bashrc file you have to reload it somehow. This may answer both of your questions:
http://apple.stackexchange.com/quest...liases-to-work

thanks snaeky!

i found the answer on how to the modify your osx "bash shell"