Quick Tip

Leverage `stty` to Tame Your Terminal Echo

Challenge: Sometimes, when you’re working with specific terminal configurations, particularly when piping input or dealing with interactive prompts in scripts, the terminal’s echo behavior can cause issues. You might want to temporarily disable or control the echoing of characters.

The Solution: The `stty` command offers fine-grained control over terminal settings, including echo. To temporarily disable echo, you can use:

stty -echo

Why it works: The `stty -echo` command instructs the terminal driver to stop echoing characters that are typed. This is particularly useful when reading sensitive input like passwords within a shell script, as it prevents the characters from appearing on the screen.

Pro-Tip: To re-enable echo, simply run stty echo. You can also use stty -echo -icanon to disable both echoing and canonical mode for raw input.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 5/7/2026