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Sudo for Windows

devblogs.microsoft.com

101–110 of 439 posts

Re: Sudo for Windows

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially I thought ur concern is crazy as hell, because who would implement it in such a painful way? But then I read >When elevating a process from the command-line with sudo, a UAC dialog will appear asking the user to confirm the elevation: LOL But it seems like there are other ways to use it without this dialog >In this configuration, sudo.exe will launch a new elevated console window and run the command in that…

Having the sudo command open an entirely separate terminal as an admin user is absolutely ridiculous and completely on brand for Microsoft. Along with the UAC dialog, I can't think of a worse way for sudo to behave. What's wrong with entering your password for sudo? How is UAC more secure than a password?

UAC is less secure than a password right?

Re: Sudo for Windows

#102
post #84

If everyone thinks this is so great (just judging by the number of times it's appeared in the HN top 30), why don't they just run linux, instead of some sh!t immitation? Everyone knows, if you can C colon, your running a M$ product...

Linux is just some [explitive deleted] imitation of Unix, where the sudo command originated. I run Windows as my primary development environment because it's better. Linux and other OSes run in VMs.

I don't think you should be downvoted for answering parent's question. It's helpful for understanding a mindset that not everyone possesses.

Which version of Windows do you currently run, and what do you feel Windows has or does that makes it superior for your development work?

Re: Sudo for Windows

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially I thought ur concern is crazy as hell, because who would implement it in such a painful way? But then I read >When elevating a process from the command-line with sudo, a UAC dialog will appear asking the user to confirm the elevation: LOL But it seems like there are other ways to use it without this dialog >In this configuration, sudo.exe will launch a new elevated console window and run the command in that…

Having the sudo command open an entirely separate terminal as an admin user is absolutely ridiculous and completely on brand for Microsoft. Along with the UAC dialog, I can't think of a worse way for sudo to behave. What's wrong with entering your password for sudo? How is UAC more secure than a password?

If you’re running as local admin you just get the dialog, but you’re not using a local admin as your daily driver user acct, right? ..Right? :)

If you’re logged in as a standard user, UAC prompts you for new username and password to authenticate and authorize the privileged operation.

Re: Sudo for Windows

#104
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share if this will ever come to Windows 10, or will it be a Windows 11+ exclusive thing?

Already working on it :) You can follow https://github.com/microsoft/sudo/issues/2 for updates. Honestly, the hardest part will be porting the Settings app changes to the Windows 10 styles. `sudo.exe` itself doesn't really depend on any OS platform changes, and if it did, we'd have a _very_ compelling case to bring those features with us downlevel.

Where exactly is sudo.exe? It doesn't appear to be in the repo. I don't need the Settings portion. The exe itself would be immensely useful.

Re: Sudo for Windows

#105
post #7
post #2

Yep, it's really happening. Sudo is coming to Windows. It's obviously not just a fork of the linux sudo - there's enough that's different about the permissions structure between OS's that just a straight port wouldn't make sense. But the dream of being able to run commands as admin, in the same terminal window - that's the experience we're finally bringing to users. I've been working on this for the last few months n…

Nice to see the author here! I have to say: I really like whats going on in Windows world from a developer perspective in the recent years. I am a hardcore Linux fanboy for decades but I have to admit that PowerShell, WSL, vscode, Windows Terminal and the recent open source strategy sounds very appealing to me. This is something MS/Win does much better in recent days compared to, for instance, Apple/Mac OS. I would l…

Only problem is Powershell's commands are abysmally slow in comparison to chaining together Linux terminal commands that are written in C.

Powershell is a super neat language though.... especially if the Microsoft team that manages it would work more with the team that does more for SMEs and not just DevOps. The overwhelming majority of windows users doing regular business work have to deal with crufty stuff like VBA or over engineered stuff like C#. I was really hopeful for Powershell, but it seems like it's almost entirely to serve IT administrators or software developers. I wish that very capable team would do things like add a fairly simple GUI DSL or form designer with the tool. I know it can hook into WinForms, but that's a lot of effort and requires more C# background. There are probably millions of business analysts that would love to build little simple GUI apps without investing weeks of effort. The current approach is to just use Python, but that has it's own bag of problems for those that can do a little coding, but aren't full time developers. It just seems weird that Microsoft never invested in a language for SMEs that would integrate well with the OS and Microsoft apps and tooling.

Re: Sudo for Windows

#107
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, that's a limitation of UAC at this point, and probably not one we can avoid. The "Show details" dropdown on the dialog does however show the commandline you requested, so at least that's one way of making sure it's the thing you ran

The best way would be, if it could say something like: Allow $PARENT_PROCESS_NAME to run $COMMAND with administrator rights. So if you would enter the following in cmd.exe: sudo notepad.exe ... It would say: Allow Command Processor Shell to run notepad.exe ... with administrator rights.

Maybe for Windows 2025 we can work with the UAC folks to get something like that. I'm still shocked to this day that we managed to ship this at all. One step at a time :)

Re: Sudo for Windows

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that Microsoft is working on eventually moving Windows over to the Linux kernel, and all these things they are doing are setting the stage and preparing for an easier transition.

As I said on the other post, I strongly doubt that. It offers few benefits and many roadblocks. It would be a monstrous amount of work, would throw into question many existing security-related certifications, break Microsoft's love of backwards-compatibility, etc. All MS is trying to do is make it easier for developers to develop on Windows for Windows, which it has ample incentive to do both internally and externall…

>Microsoft's love of backwards-compatibility

This is like, the primary reason to do this move. Wine has better compatibility for windows software than windows has now in my experience.

Re: Sudo for Windows

#110
post #2

Yep, it's really happening. Sudo is coming to Windows. It's obviously not just a fork of the linux sudo - there's enough that's different about the permissions structure between OS's that just a straight port wouldn't make sense. But the dream of being able to run commands as admin, in the same terminal window - that's the experience we're finally bringing to users. I've been working on this for the last few months n…

I've been using the 'sudo' that scoop offers for a while, and it has always done exactly what I wanted and completely removed the hassle of having to open a new cmd/powershell with 'run as administrator'.

Plus it means I don't have to leave the comfort of Tabby.

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