How to pass password as an argument to a shell script - linux

Question

I am in process of automating installation of sage through ansible-playbook. In that I need to run two shell scripts.
Here is how the first shell script look:
#!/bin/bash
# Creating Sage notebook
dir="/root/.sage/sage_notebook.sagenb"
screen -S "Sage_Server" sage -c 'notebook(interface="", directory=$dir, port=80, accounts=true)'
This is the second shell script's code:
#!/bin/bash
# Creating Sage inotebook
address=$(hostname --ip-address)
sage -c "inotebook(interface=" "'$address'" ",port=80,accounts=true)"
And this is how the playbook looks:
---
- hosts: localhost
remote_user: root
tasks:
- name : update system
apt : update_cache=yes
- name : install m4
apt : name=m4 state=present
- name : install build-essential
apt : name=build-essential state=present
- name : install gcc
apt : name=gcc state=present
- name : install gfortran
apt : name=gfortran state=present
- name : install libssl-dev
apt : name=libssl-dev state=present
- name : install python-software-properties
apt : name=python-software-properties state=present
- name : add sage ppa repo
apt_repository: repo='ppa:aims/sagemath'
- name : update system
apt : update_cache=yes
- name : install dvipng
apt : name=dvipng state=present
- name : install sage binary
apt : name=sagemath-upstream-binary state=present
- name : invoke create_sagenb script
command: /usr/bin/screen -d -m sudo /root/databases-and-datamining-iiith/python-scripts/create_sagenb -i -y
- name : invoke start_sage script
command: /usr/bin/screen -d -m sudo /root/databases-and-datamining-iiith/python-scripts/start_sage -i -y
Now when I run the first script, it asks for a new sage password which could be anything. But I am not able to pass that password from the playbook.
Still, if I do
ps -ef | grep sh
I could see that the scripts are running but the sage service is not running.
It needs the password in order to start the service.
Could anyone please tell me how can I provide password as an argument to the shell scripts through command.

Answer 1

I don't know sage and don't know how to provide a password in an alternative way, but if the program ask for a password than you can probably use expect as suggested here.

Answer 2

As a rule of thumb you shouldn't run scripts that needs user input in ansible playbooks.
You could try to use something like
echo "password" | script.sh
or
Create a sage-password file in /etc containing the password and:
script.sh < /etc/sage-password
But this will only work if it is reading from stdin - most applications read password directly from terminal device driver (i.e. /dev/ttyS# ), in that case this trick won't work.
If that's the case, take a look to the sage docs, they should have a more robust way for non-interactive startup.