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It's been known for decades on other Unix systems that you shouldn't pass passwords by command line parameter> could you provide some references to the statement?
If you search the Usenet archives, you can find many discussions about this. It's one of those topics that came up frequently in the comp.unix newsgroup as early as 1991 that I see in some messages.
Usenet discussion from 1994:
"ps e gets you a processes environment. It is totally unsafe to store anything that should be secret. if there needs to be secret data, the best way to get it is with scanf(), once the program is running."[1]
And here is the Secure UNIX Programming FAQ from 1999:
"A security hole related to FreeBSD's 'ps' utility. The utility would allow users to view another process' environment variables. Consequently applications like pppd that accepted passwords via environment variables became vulnerable to unauthorized release of privileged information attacks. In fact, thehole was not related to 'ps' if you think about it critically. The application that places privileged information in the environment variable is at fault."[2]
[1]https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!search/ then search for "ps shows command line parameters" (for the exact message, search for "ps e gets you a processes environment")
[2]http://faqs.cs.uu.nl/na-dir/unix-faq/programmer/secure-progr...