I found a short article about how to mount a truecrypt volume from a shell script without showing password in process list, see also the comments which provide some alternatives and clarification.
I use…
echo $password | truecrypt -t -k "" --protect-hidden=no /path/to/encrypted.tc /media/truecrypt1
The -t option makes TrueCrypt work in text mode so you can pipe the password to a terminal prompt, and the other options (-k "" --protect-hidden=no) prevent TrueCrypt giving additional prompts which would otherwise confuse the piping of the password variable.
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