Scripting “sudo” with PowerShell

Now that I finally have some time on my hands to get a little into Microsoft PowerShell again I decided to work on small things to remember what I learned once (aeons ago 😉 ).

And guess what, there was a practical command I always lack on Windows, it’s the great sudo command from the Unix/Linux world. It basically starts a program with elevated rights (just the rough idea).

Because doing it yourself is fine but looking how other people do it is just as nice I decided to consult Google and found Peter Provost’s great post for a PowerShell script that does exactly what I wanted.

The script launches a new process with elevated rights, only one thing was bugging me a little (yeah, I’m nitpicking now!): I had to provide the full path to the executable. Gee-wiz, how dare you!

Easy to fix with the addition of a few lines of code:

if([System.IO.File]::Exists("$(get-location)\$file"))
{
$file = "$(Get-Location)\$file";
}

Now I can just type i.e. “sudo MyApp.exe” or “sudo MyDir\MyApp.exe” when the application is in that very directory and it launches.

I really enjoy myself working with PowerShell again. Personally I think it’s a shame this great piece of software isn’t a default part of Windows Server 2008 just because it’s .net based (yes, that’s the reason, you can’t install .net on Server Core setups without kinks)…