Password prompting in Ant

Sometimes you've just gotta prompt for info in Ant. Everything can't go in config files-- passwords, for example.

The problem is, for things like passwords we'd really like to not have Ant echo what we're typing.

It turns out that in Ant 1.7.1 they added a "SecureInputHandler" which does this (it takes advantage of some things in Java 1.6). It's not documented, exactly, but its in there:

<target name="input-test" >
  <input message="username:>" addproperty="username" defaultvalue="lalala" />

  <input message="password:>" addproperty="password">
   <handler classname="org.apache.tools.ant.input.SecureInputHandler" />
  </input>

  <echo message="username= ${username}" />
  <echo message="password= ${password}" />
 </target>