authentication support question

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005, Vincent Carey 525-2265 wrote:

I need to obtain username and password strings from the
user of a certain process running in R.  scan() can be used
to get the strings, but the password will be echoed back as the
user types it.  Is there any way to load keyboard input
to a variable without echoing the input back to the screen?

Not from an arbitrary terminal.

You haven't told us the OS, but e.g. on Unix-alikes with readline it is
readline rather than R which is doing the echoing.

I would us a dialog box for such things: graphapp has one which we use for
proxy authentication under Windows.