You didn't specify which O.S. you are using, but it should be Vista or later, as this is typical User Account Control behaviour.
Basically, in recent Windows system, even if your user account is a member of the Administrators group of the computer, you are still not allowed to perform administrative tasks; if you try to do something actually requiring administrative rights, either the action will fail or a popup window will appear asking you to confirm the action; if you instead only have standard user rights, you will be asked to provide the credentials of a real Administrator account.
If you right-click on something and choose to "Run as Administrator", UAC will ask you for confirmation and then you will be able to effectively bypass it, and the program (not just cmd.exe
, BTW) will run with full administrative rights. This is especially useful with programs that are not compatible with UAC, and tend to silently fail if they require administrative rights and you just double-click on them while UAC is operational.
This of course doesn't have any relevance if UAC is disabled (that can be done via Control Panel), in which case double-clicking the icon or choosing to "Run as Administrator" do exactly the same thing; but the window title will still reflect the "elevated" status of that command prompt.
If you are asking "how can I run a command as Administrator (i.e. elevated) from the command line", AFAIK there is no built-in support for this. It would indeed be nice to have start /elevated
or runas /elevated
switches.