Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

The Python 3 Standard Library is a vast array of modules that you can use for developing various kinds of applications. It contains an exhaustive list of libraries, and this book will help you choose the best one to address specific programming problems in Python. The Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook begins with recipes on containers and data structures and guides you in performing effective text management in Python. You will find Python recipes for command-line operations, networking, filesystems and directories, and concurrent execution. You will learn about Python security essentials in Python and get to grips with various development tools for debugging, benchmarking, inspection, error reporting, and tracing. The book includes recipes to help you create graphical user interfaces for your application. You will learn to work with multimedia components and perform mathematical operations on date and time. The recipes will also show you how to deploy different searching and sorting algorithms on your data. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills needed to write clean code in Python and develop applications that meet your needs.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Asking for passwords


In terminal-based programs, it's common to ask for passwords from our users. It's usually a bad idea to do so from command options, as on Unix-like systems, they will be visible to anyone with access to the shell who is able to run a ps command to get the list of processes, and to anyone willing to run a history command to get the list of recently executed commands.

While there are ways to tweak the command arguments to hide them from the list of processes, it's always best to ask for passwords interactively so that no trace of them is left.

But, asking for them interactively is not enough, unless you also ensure they are not displayed while typing, otherwise anyone looking at your screen can grab all your passwords.

How to do it...

Luckily, the Python standard library provides an easy way to input passwords from a prompt without showing them back:

>>> import getpass
>>> pwd = getpass.getpass()
Password: 
>>> print(pwd)
'HelloWorld'

How it works...