PuTTY semi-bug windows-stdio-prompts

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summary: Send Windows console tools' prompts directly to the console
class: semi-bug: This might or might not be a bug, depending on your precise definition of what a bug is.
present-in: 0.81
fixed-in: 80aed962862ec73e231cb0c0bfd7d94dbc4d4bc3

The Windows console tools (Plink, PSCP, and PSFTP) now send interactive prompts, and read the user's responses, directly from the console, if possible, rather than printing prompts to the (redirectable) standard error stream and reading from standard input. (If there's no console involved, they'll fall back to the old behaviour.)

This means that you can, for instance, provide input intended for an established Plink session from another process, while still being able to enter passwords, passphrases, and suchlike interactively during session setup. (Previously, any process trying to drive Plink would have had to contend with the prompts itself, or suppress them.)

This brings the Windows tools' behaviour into line with the Unix versions (which access /dev/tty directly in the analogous situation).

It also allows the tools to read usernames and passwords from the console as Unicode, so that you can enter a username that contains characters not in the system's default character set.

If this change causes a problem for you, you can get the old behaviour by adding the option -legacy-stdio-prompts to the command line.


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Audit trail for this semi-bug.
(last revision of this bug record was at 2024-11-17 18:59:29 +0000)