readline

Christian's code works well, but if you want to be able to hide the user input and not echo it to screen, you need to add -s to the read command. The code below is an expanded function that allows an optional prompt and optional hiding of the input:function read_password($prompt=null, $hide=false){    if($prompt) print $prompt;    $s = ($hide) ? '-s' : '';    $f=popen("read $s; echo \$REPLY","r");    $input=fgets($f,100);    pclose($f);    if($hide) print "\n";    return $input;}

If your CLI script accepts input from STDIN and you also want it to prompt for a password (e.g. as mysql client does), then readline() won't work for you. What you need to do is read from the terminal device as shown below.function readline_terminal($prompt = '') {    $prompt && print $prompt;    $terminal_device = '/dev/tty';    $h = fopen($terminal_device, 'r');    if ($h === false) {        #throw new RuntimeException("Failed to open terminal device $terminal_device");        return false; # probably not running in a terminal.    }    $line = rtrim(fgets($h),"\r\n");    fclose($h);    return $line;}$pass = readline_terminal('Password: ');

In CGI mode be sure to call:ob_implicit_flush(true);at the top of your script if you want to be able to output data before and after the prompt.-- Tomas V.V.Cox

a few observations....I use Cygwin PHP v7 and readline is available. The readline_list_history() function though is not defined.A prompt with escape sequences are sanitized, so use something like:<?php    echo("\e[0m\e[34mPromt>\e[0m");    $inp = readline(' ');?>I have not fully documented it, but I see that sometimes strings beginning with punctuation characters do not make it into the history with readline_add_history(). They also sometimes clear the prompt string.

Note that readline() will return boolean "false" when the user presses CTRL+D.