How do I echo stars (*) when reading password with `read`?

Question

What do I need to do for code in Bash, if I want to echo *s in place of password characters (or even just hide the characters completely) when the user types so

Answer 1

stty -echo
read something
stty echo

will stop user input being echoed to the screen for that read. Depending on what you are doing with prompts, you may want to add an extra echo command to generate a newline after the read.