This tool emulates Unix sudo in cygwin. It allows you to run applications in elevated user mode from a non-elevated cygwin shell.
It is based on nu774's tool and has full terminal support, so you can run interactive applications like vim or a shell through it.
cygwin-sudo requires Python >= 3.5. You can get it by installing python3
with the cygwin installer.
Clone this repository or just download cygwin-sudo.py.
You can test if the script works by running python3 cygwin-sudo.py id -nG and
comparing the output with just running id -nG. Running the command through
cygwin-sudo should add an Administrator group to the outputed list.
For convenience, you might want to add an alias to this script, eg:
alias sudo="python3 /path-to-cygwin-sudo/cygwin-sudo.py"
$ sudo vim /etc/hosts
$ sudo cp foo.txt /cygdrive/c/Program Files/
$ sudo cygstart cmd # open elevated standard command prompt
$ sudo cygstart regedit
$ sudo bash # open elevated shell
Note that it will open an UAC prompt every time it is run, so if you want to run multiple commands in succession, you should open an elevated shell (see example above) and run your commands from there
When run, cygwin-sudo uses cygstart to run a second process in elevated mode.
For security reasons, Windows prevents most kinds of communication between
elevated and non-elevated processes. So, the elevated process connects to the
non-elevated process via TCP for communication. To prevent other processes from
interfering with this connection, it's secured with a random password.
The elevated process will then run the given command and exchange input and output with the original process via the TCP connection. The command is run in a pty, so it acts as if running in an ordinary terminal. Therefore, you can run interactive console-based programs like vim or less.
- nu774's sudo-for-cygwin: The inspiration for this tool
- wsl-sudo: A wsl version of this tool