James Edward Gray II wrote:
>
> I have a question about this solution.  You're stopping when you see  a 
> carriage-return above, but what does Windows really tact onto the  end 
> of the line?

Nothing, by using getch I get every character and DOS/Windows doesn't do 
anything. That is why I put that extra puts there. Otherwise the result 
looks like this:

Please give me your password: Got 'ryan'

> Is it a carriage return line feed pair, as I  suspect?

Nope.

> Put another way, if you changed the above from 13 to 10,  would it still 
> work?

Nope. In that case you have to type Ctrl-J to end, whereas with 13 you 
can hit the enter key or type Ctrl-M. I'm starting to think you will see 
the same behavior on Unix and Mac.

 > Last question on this, I promise.  Does Windows echo the carriage
 > return (and possibly line feed), when character reading like this?

As I said above, it echoes nothing.

I'm definitely thinking my solution would make a good general 
multi-platform password prompter, with only the implementation of getch 
requiring multi-platform code.

Ryan