Picocli 3.9.6

The picocli community is pleased to announce picocli 3.9.6.

This release improves support for interactive (password) options:

• interactive options can now use type char[] instead of String, to allow applications to null out the array after use so that sensitive information is no longer resident in memory
• interactive options can be optionally interactive if configured with arity = "0..1"

This is the fifty-second public release.
Picocli follows semantic versioning.

Table of Contents

• New and noteworthy
• Fixed issues
• Deprecations
• Potential breaking changes

New and Noteworthy

This release improves support for interactive (password) options:

• interactive options can now use type char[] instead of String, to allow applications to null out the array after use so that sensitive information is no longer resident in memory
• interactive options can be optionally interactive if configured with arity = "0..1"

For example, if an application has these options:

@Option(names = "--user")
String user;

@Option(names = "--password", arity = "0..1", interactive = true)
char[] password;

With the following input, the password field will be initialized to "123" without prompting the user for input:

--password 123 --user Joe

However, if the password is not specified, the user will be prompted to enter a value. In the following example, the password option has no parameter, so the user will be prompted to type in a value on the console:

--password --user Joe

Fixed issues

• [#657] Support type char[] for interactive options. Thanks to Lukáš Petrovický for raising this issue.
• [#536] Support optionally interactive options. Thanks to Lukas Heumos for raising this issue.

Deprecations

No features were deprecated in this release.

Potential breaking changes

This release has no breaking changes.