Famous last words...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Cecile Chi [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>
> Thanks to all who responded!
> problem is to keep a Social Security Number from echoing on the
> screen when a user enters it from the keyboard or a barcode scanner.
> [...]
> For my present problem, I've used the FCONTROL options [...]
> program is all changed, and the people who got upset at seeing their
> Social Security Number on the screen should be happy.

Except they won't be :)

Now they'll complain that the computer "seems hung -- it won't take any
input here" when nothing at all echos on the screen :) :) :)

I believe View/vplus has a "securityfield" option which is precisely for
this type of application -- regardless of what is typed, a "placeholder"
character is displayed instead of the actual character.  The problem is,
this is terminal specific [must support view] and somewhat program specific
[you need to create a view/vplus screen...]  If you're already using this,
then you're set [but I suspect you're not from what you've written so far]

A viable alternative, which does go back to "what escape sequence do I use?"
is actually to place a "shift-out" [or is it shift-in?] character at the end
of your prompt -- on HP terminals this causes the "alternate" character set,
usually the line-drawing set, to be displayed instead of
humanly-recognizable characters.  [then again, I don't remember if the
line-drawing set covers numbers or not, since this is a numeric input field]

The ultimate solution, of course, is to convert your program to
single-character I/O [ugh!] and manually intervene on the part of
re-displaying the character...