Is it possible to hide the user input from read-host in Powershell?

powershell input hide cmdlet
Tobias picture Tobias · Nov 9, 2016 · Viewed 14.9k times · Source

I´m looking for a way to hide the user input from the Read-Host cmdlet.

I know I can do this with -assecurestring, but I´d like to save the input as plain text in my variable.

Is there a possible way to do this?

Answer

Martin Brandl picture Martin Brandl · Nov 9, 2016

You have to use the -AsSecureString switch but you can also retrieve the plaintext value:

$securedValue = Read-Host -AsSecureString
$bstr = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::SecureStringToBSTR($securedValue)
$value = [System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::PtrToStringAuto($bstr)

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