Passing password for sudo commands about spur.py

[mwilliamson]

Thanks for the kind words. Could you point me towards the section of the paramiko docs that explain how to pass a password to sudo? What happens if you just write to stdin?

[foxbunny]

I don't see any response from OP, so I'll mention that writing to STDIN followed by a newline works just fine for me.

[mwilliamson]

Good to know, thanks!

[preems]

Thanks. That worked for me too.
Does this also supports shell features like pipes and reading from bash environment variables ?

[mwilliamson]

You'd have to explicitly start a bash shell to get access to bash shell features e.g.

shell.run(["sh", "-c", "echo $PATH"])

It seems as if there's no issue here, so I'm closing.

[eddawley]

I think this issue should be reopened as spur does not really support SUDO commands that require passwords. The problem is that there is no way to determine if the connection is waiting on a password from the user so there's no way to tell if you need to write the password to stdin. This is an inherent problem with the fact that SshProcess() does not expose stdout until the process has completed.

One workaround is that you can run the following first to see if a password will be expected:
ssh.run(['sudo', '-n', 'whoami'], allow_error=True).return_code

That workaround is suboptimal though because sudo has a timeout for cached passwords so you never know when you'll run another command that needs you to resend the password.

[mwilliamson]

This is an inherent problem with the fact that SshProcess() does not expose stdout until the process has completed.

You can pass in a file-like object in the stdout argument, which will be written to as the process runs.