sudo on Windows - Sneak Peek

Screencast

Links

• sudo at Microsoft Learn

Introduction

Linux and Mac users use the sudo command naturally in order to execute something with elevated privileges. For Windows users however this always was somewhat quirky because you either had to start the terminal session as an admin or otherwise hack your way in. This is about to change!

Installation

sudo is only available on the latest Insider Preview versions of Windows 11. As of the time of this article my current version of Windows is 24H2 (26120.3281). After this is installed you have to enable sudo in the Windows Settings Developer-section:

Usage

The simples example is to open a Windows Terminal with privileged access from another terminal. With sudo this is as easy as:

sudo wt

This command will open the Windows-UAC-confirmation dialog and after you approved the request the screen looks something like this:

This is nice! The next stuff we could do is opening the hosts file as an Administrator:

> sudo notepad C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts

Now this file opened in the editor can be safed without any issue because the notepad is running as admin.

Other useful examples could be:

sudo choco upgrade all
sudo pwsh Get-ChildItem

and more.

Current limitations

Whatever command you call after sudo, it needs to be an executable. So sudo ls will not work. First because it is an alias but more importantly because this is not a executable file but a PowerShell command and thus not a Windows EXE.

Conclusion

Lets see how this evolves over time and what the final version will look like. Having the option now is already helping me in some of my daily routines. So good, Microsoft!