By "entering passwords", you likely mean entering data without being visible for the user.

(suggested by geirha) When using bash, you can use the -s option to prevent typed characters from being displayed:

read -p "Password please: " -s pass

Alternatively, change the behavior of the terminal to hide typed characters with stty -echo (disable echo). After reading the password with the shell built-in read into a variable (in the below example, $pass), turn it back on with stty echo. Because the new line from Enter is hidden to, you've to print a newline to get future output on a new line.

stty -echo

read -p "Password please: " pass

stty echo

printf '

'

read and printf are shell built-ins. stty is provided by the coreutils package which is installed by default. That means that this snippet is very portable.

Note: the -p option is not standard, but from bash. If you need to display a prompt in other shells, use:

printf "Password please: "

stty -echo

read pass

stty echo

printf '

'

References:

• Manual page of stty


• Manual page of bash