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

In UNIX, I always make these scripts setuid and store the user and password info in a file that's heavily protected (the entire directory tree is non-readable/searchable by regular users and the file itself is readable only by the owner of the script).