8
I wrote the (rather simple) TOUACExt for SUDO for CygWin, a pre-beta shell script automation that approaches to the behavior of classical sudo
for Linux:
Installation requires copying the four .sh
scripts to some path directory, creating an alias and just a few more steps detailed in the thread.
The results: you type a single sudo YourCommand
and you get the output of it, without having to worry about the rest of the process.
35
One way is to create a fake "sudo" command with the following content:
#!/usr/bin/bash
"$@"
This will allow the install.sh
to continue, because sudo is found.
This doesn't elevate privileges like real sudo does. If you really need elevated privileges start cygwin shell with from an account with administrative privileges (XP) or r-click on cygwin.bat and "run as administrator" (Vista,Win7)
5Just out of curiosity from someone who doesn't speak fluent bash
: Why does this work? The manpage doesn't say anything about $@
doing anything sudo
-like. Instead it's just all arguments to the script. And wouldn't the quotes around it be superfluous in that case? Otherwise if you'd do a sudo foo bar
then it tries executing "foo bar"
as a single command which probably doesn't exist given that irrational fear of spaces on UNIX-like systems. – Joey – 2010-03-23T10:29:05.037
7@Johannes: "$@"
(when double-quoted) works differently from "$*"
: it expands to a separate word for every positional variable. Example: If $1 == "foo bar"
and $2 == "baz"
, then "$@"
is "foo bar" baz
- one word for each parameter (unlike "$*"
, which results in "foo bar baz"
as one word). See manual of bash
, section Parameters, subsection Special parameters. The end result of Peon's script is that it executes its arguments exactly as they were passed. – user1686 – 2010-03-23T15:22:19.743
1Ah, ok. And where does the sudo
part come in? Above snippet doesn't do anything remotely in that direction, right? – Joey – 2010-03-23T15:38:33.407
2@Johannes: In Unix, a real sudo
would raise privileges from mortal to root
before running the command. In Cygwin, there is no such thing, so Peon's fake script (which you're supposed to name sudo
) just runs the command directly without changing its privileges. (This means you may need to run ./install.sh
as Administrator.) – user1686 – 2010-03-23T15:49:10.873
1Something really smart would be to write something involving win32security.ImpersonateLoggedInUser()
, or at least runas
, in order to actually raise privileges to Administrator... however, I'm stuck on XP and don't know if that works with UAC. Peon's solution is much simpler. – user1686 – 2010-03-23T15:51:41.867
2@grawity: runas
should work, it doesn't rely on UAC and prompts for a password by itself. I was just confused why the script in the answer apparently didn't do what the name implied which I assumed was the goal. Sorry for my stupidity ;-) – Joey – 2010-03-23T17:12:35.433
1+1. Note though that since the real sudo
supports options this can break on occasions. A smarter wrapper script would have knowledge about those and strip them away to avoid breakage on invocations with options, e.g. sudo -n
. – Adrian Frühwirth – 2013-09-10T14:53:38.170
Note: newline in that script should be 0x0A
. – Nakilon – 2013-12-18T13:57:41.377
22
I found the answer on the cygwin mailing list. To run command
with elevated privileges in Cygwin, precede the command with cygstart --action=runas
like this:
$ cygstart --action=runas command
This will open a Windows dialogue box asking for the Admin password and run the command if the proper password is entered.
This is easily scripted, so long as ~/bin
is in your path:
$ cat ~/bin/sudo
#!/usr/bin/bash
cygstart --action=runas "$@"
$ PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
$ chmod +x ~/bin/sudo
$ sudo elevatedCommand
Tested on 64-bit Windows 8.
curiously, this strips out /bin
and /usr/bin
from the PATH
. It does successfully invoke emacs: ShellExecute(NULL, "runas", "C:\cygwin64\bin\emacs-w32.exe", "(null)", "(null)", 1)
but then emacs cannot find ls
for e.g. M-x dired
, even after interactively restoring the PATH using (setenv ...)
. Is there a trusted paths issue here? – BaseZen – 2018-03-08T18:27:22.777
5The problem with the cygstart
method is that it only works for Windows commands/programs. You can not do sudo ls
. SUDO for CygWin is neat, but still lacks some good sudo
command in it. – Sopalajo de Arrierez – 2014-04-13T20:59:10.297
Thank you, Sopalajode. In what situation have you needed to use sudo ls
in Cygwin? – dotancohen – 2014-04-17T10:04:12.440
3
Oh, no, @Dotancohen, it was just an example. You can use sudo
for CygWin to run any Windows or CygWin command. It is very useful for me. But the more practical method I have found is this script wrapper for SUDO for CygWin I developed: http://superuser.com/questions/741345/practical-closest-to-the-classical-linux-one-way-to-use-automate-sudo-for-cy (still in Beta, but seems to work ). With it you can comfortably order things like sudo net start vncserver
.
@SopalajodeArrierez: That is absolutely terrific! Thank you for the post and the link. – dotancohen – 2014-04-17T12:15:49.733
5
Building on dotancohen's answer I'm using an alias:
alias sudo="cygstart --action=runas"
Works as a charm for external programs (not shell built-ins, though):
sudo chown User:Group <file>
3
Sudo (Elevate) for Windows™
I do a lot of work on the command line in Windows™.
In Cygwin itself I believe you can run a root command with su -c /the/cmd
as for sudo itself within Windows™ file-system elevating the user's permissions from the command line, If you are an administrator, this will work great for you. Otherwise, use runas and get admin's pass ;).
Now I cannot remember where we got this code but here it is. I hope it helps.
BTW, the package we use to compile this was gcc-mingw32
.
$ i586-mingw32msvc-gcc sudo.c -o sudo.exe
# Put sudo.exe in /usr/bin or in your windows path (%homedrive%\windows)
#example:
$ sudo vi /cygdrive/c/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts
/**
* (sudo for Windows™)
* @filename sudo.c
*/
#ifndef UNICODE
#define UNICODE
#endif
#include <windows.h>
#include <shellapi.h>
#include <wchar.h>
LPWSTR *mergestrings(LPWSTR *left, LPCWSTR right)
{
size_t size = ( 1 + lstrlen(*left) + lstrlen(right) ) * sizeof(LPWSTR*);
if ( *left ) {
LPWSTR leftcopy = _wcsdup(*left);
*left = (LPWSTR)realloc(*left, size);
*left = lstrcpy(*left, leftcopy);
*left = lstrcat(*left, right);
free( leftcopy );
}
else
*left = _wcsdup(right);
return left;
}
int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE prevInstance, LPSTR lpcommand, int nShowCmd)
{
DWORD result = 0x2a;
LPWSTR *argv = NULL;
int argc = 0;
if ( argv = CommandLineToArgvW(GetCommandLineW(), &argc) ) {
if ( argc < 2 ) {
LPWSTR usagemsg = NULL;
usagemsg = *mergestrings(&usagemsg, argv[0]);
usagemsg = *mergestrings(&usagemsg, TEXT(" <command_to_run> [arguments]"));
MessageBox(NULL, usagemsg, TEXT("Usage:"), MB_OK | MB_ICONEXCLAMATION );
LocalFree( argv );
free( usagemsg );
return ERROR_BAD_ARGUMENTS;
}
else {
LPWSTR command = argv[1];
LPWSTR arguments = NULL;
int c;
for ( c = 2; c < argc; c++ ) {
arguments = *mergestrings(&arguments, argv[c]);
arguments = *mergestrings(&arguments, TEXT(" "));
}
result = (DWORD)ShellExecute(NULL, TEXT("runas"), command, arguments, NULL, SW_SHOWNORMAL);
LocalFree( argv );
if ( arguments )
free( arguments );
switch ( result )
{
case 0:
result = ERROR_OUTOFMEMORY;
break;
case 27:
case 31:
result = ERROR_NO_ASSOCIATION;
break;
case 28:
case 29:
case 30:
result = ERROR_DDE_FAIL;
break;
case 32:
result = ERROR_DLL_NOT_FOUND;
break;
default:
if ( result > 32 )
result = 0x2a;
}
}
}
else
result = GetLastError();
if (result != 0x2a) {
LPWSTR errormsg = NULL;
FormatMessage(FORMAT_MESSAGE_FROM_SYSTEM | FORMAT_MESSAGE_ALLOCATE_BUFFER,
NULL, result, 0, (LPWSTR)&errormsg, 0, NULL);
MessageBox(NULL, errormsg, TEXT("Error:"), MB_OK | MB_ICONERROR);
LocalFree( errormsg );
return result;
}
else
return NO_ERROR;
}
@user185282: Good points. I've downvoted the answer. – unforgettableidSupportsMonica – 2017-03-20T03:28:32.470
Dear tao: You wrote, "I cannot remember where we got this code". Did you write this code, or did someone else write it? – unforgettableidSupportsMonica – 2017-03-20T03:28:38.647
5This code is awful. It's full of errors like not checking the return value of realloc() before dereferencing or writing sizeof(LPWSTR) instead of sizeof(LPWSTR) where LPWSTR seems to be a pointer type and one wants to retrieve the size of one character, not the size of the pointer. Furthermore, it's totally unclear why e.g. case 29 leads to ERROR_DDE_FAIL. Can you conclude from the code why? I can't and I guess anybody else can't, too. Please, do not post such code in the future. – None – 2013-01-08T08:59:37.397
4@Mattew: please in the future help the community by posting a cleaned up version of the code snippet you dislike. – Erik Kaplun – 2013-01-20T14:36:33.683
Code shouldn't be on superuser. Put it on codereview.se, and just link it from here. – Ben Voigt – 2014-04-14T02:19:11.847
2
A slight improvement on Peon's fake sudo script:
#!/bin/sh
# Drop any option arguments.
while [[ $# -ge 0 && $1 = -* ]]; do
shift
done
"$@"
This script silently drops any options passed to sudo and executes the command (without actually elevating the privileges). Dropping the options improves compatibility somewhat. A more complete wrapper script should actually parse options the same way sudo does.
Instead of trying to replace sudo with a wrapper that does cygstart --action=runas "$@"
, just use this simple fake sudo wrapper and run your install script itself (or whatever you're trying to run that uses sudo) with elevated privileges.
@dotancohen, I hope I picked the right one. – Jason Sundram – 2015-03-30T00:16:43.267
Looks like a good solution to me! Cygwin support has certain gotten better in the past five years! – dotancohen – 2015-03-30T07:35:09.670
1
See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4090301/root-user-sudo-equivalent-in-cygwin
– Benj – 2016-08-03T09:29:44.653@Benj, I wonder why that question didn't get migrated here, too. – Jason Sundram – 2016-08-03T22:25:45.710
@JasonSundram indeed. Let me know if the answer is moved, I'll then update the link. – Benj – 2016-08-04T07:52:42.640