Simon Gregory

Here’s a useful snippet to enable you to securely store passwords in OS X’s keychain and use them in a shell scripts.

#!/bin/bash

PASSWORD=`exec osascript <<EOF | tr "\r" "\n"

    (*
     To use the Keychain to store the admin password then 

     Open /Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app
     Add a new keychain called "TM"
     Add a Key with the name "test" and store your password in it.

     I'd recommend learning how keychains work then tailoring
     the process to your security needs.
    *)

    tell application "Keychain Scripting"
        set myKeyChain to keychain "TM.keychain"
        set theKeyList to every key of myKeyChain
        set thePassword to ""
        repeat with x from 1 to (length of theKeyList)
            set theKey to item x of theKeyList
            if the name of theKey is "test" then
                set thePassword to password of theKey
                --exit repeat leaves us without
                --a value returned to the shell script...
            end if
        end repeat
    end tell

EOF`

echo "$PASSWORD"

exit 0;

Download:

Update: As of Leopard it is now possible to do this via the command line tool security