Ruby shell visibility - ruby

Question

I am trying to shell out in Ruby to use SSH. I know there is an SSH module but I don't want to use it. I find it clunky and confusing.
I am able to shell out and use SSH very nicely. I have one complaint, however, that I was hoping someone could offer some suggestions.
In Bash I can do this:
echo "PASSWORD" | ssh SERVER "sudo -S cat /etc/sudoers"
and it will show up as this when I do a ps -ef:
USER 8212 8837 0 09:31 pts/7 00:00:00 ssh SERVER sudo -S cat /etc/sudoers
The password is NOT shown when doing a ps -ef.
When I do the same in ruby, it is echoing the password:
%x[echo "#{password}" | ssh -q -o BatchMode=yes SERVER "sudo -S cat /etc/sudoers 2>/dev/null"].split("\n")
Shows up on the server with ps -ef:
sh -c echo "PASSWORD" | ssh -q -o BatchMode=yes SERVER "sudo -S cat /etc/sudoers 2>/dev/null"

Answer 1

Try using Ruby's Open3.popen3 or Open3.capture3. But, I don't think it'll work because ssh doesn't accept the password from STDIN and will rewire the input to come from the keyboard, at least that's the behavior I've encountered on CentOS and Mac OS.
Here's some code to test it against:
require 'open3'
host = 'myhost'
user = 'myname'
password = 'mypassword'
stdin, stdout, stderr, wait_thr = Open3.popen3(ENV, %Q[ssh #{host} "cat /home/#{user}/.bash_profile"])
pid = wait_thr[:pid]
stdin.puts password
stdin.close
puts stdout.read
stdout.close
puts stderr.read
stderr.close
exit_status = wait_thr.value
Running it shows the ssh prompt, even though the password is "puts" on the stdin channel, followed by the output once I enter the password:
myname#myhost's password:
# .bash_profile
# Get the aliases and functions
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
. ~/.bashrc
fi
# User specific environment and startup programs
set editing-mode vi
# complete -W "$(echo $(grep '^ssh ' .bash_history | sort -u | sed 's/^ssh //'))" ssh
complete -W "$(echo $(grep '^ssh ' .bash_history | sort -u | sed 's/^ssh //' | sed 's/^.+#//'))" ssh
PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
export PATH
export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(rbenv init -)"
While Net::SSH might be "clunky", it is designed to allow you to cleanly work around this behavior in ssh. We use Net::SSH extensively internally, and it's working really well for our needs.