shell script (running via cron) to enter password when prompted

Question

Hi, I have a daily cron task which automatically unrars a rar file and processes it's contents, however, the contents are now password protected so i'm wondering if there's a reliable way to echo the password when prompted? The password prompt comes from the UNRAR program i've installed, running on CentOS. Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

If you're using unrar for unpacking, you can define the password as command line parameter:

unrar x -ppassword package.rar

Note that there's no space between -p and your password parameter.