Best practices for holding passwords in shell / Perl scripts?

Question

I\'ve recently had to dust off my Perl and shell script skills to help out some colleagues. The colleagues in question have been tasked with providing some reports from an inter

Answer 1

Personally I hold passwords in configuration files which are then distributed independently of the application, and can be changed to the specific machine/environment. In shell scripts you can source these within the main script.

However, in Perl there are a variety of approaches. You may wish to investigate Getopt::Long for command line options (and additionally Getopt::ArgvFile to store those in a simple configuration file), or look at something like Config::IniFiles for something with a little more power behind it. These are the two types I generally use, but there are other configuration file modules available.