I found a (lengthy) guide to doing this but it is for gksu which is gone. I have to imagine there’s an easy way. I am running Ubuntu. There is no specific use case, it is just a feature I miss from windows.
EDIT: I always expect a degree of hostility and talking-down from the desktop Linux community, but the number of people in this thread telling me I am using my own computer that I bought with my own money in a way they don’t prefer while ignoring my question is just absurd and frankly should be deeply embarrassing for all of us. I have strongly defended the desktop Linux community for decades, but this experience has left a sour taste in my mouth.
Thank you to the few of you who tried to assist without judgement or assumptions.
Almost anything. The first thing I tried to do was delete a file off of a network share. Also, editing the name of a file copied from a network share. Also, editing text files, also, formatting a thumb drive. I am not afraid of the command line, I just don’t prefer it for every single time.
Some people may consider this a permissions issue, which is technically correct but does not bring anyone closer to solving the problem that:
Delete file - enter password - [the file gets deleted]Is a lot more straightforward of a process for some people than navigating file permissions system and entering the correct commands into the terminal just to be rid of a file you didn’t want in the first place.
That’s a permissions problem not a run as root problem.
That was also my take. If it’s something you should be able to edit, your user should have permissions to do that. Jumping to running as root every time has lots of unintended consequences.
I do think a functionally similar idea would be a button to “take ownership” (grant “/r/w/x”) of a file that would prompt for root password. That way things don’t run as root that shouldn’t. Would that be a good compromise between Linux permissions and Windows workflow?
Regarding formatting a drive, whatever program you are doing that in should ask for root p/w when performing that operation. If it just refuses because of permissions that seems like a bug.
Isn’t that a feature that’s already implemented? The alternative is you could run chown -R [username] . in the correct directory.
That’s what I’m thinking. A menu entry that just runs chown -R [username] on whatever you click is the idea
That’s would work but it would be kind of dangerous
See? This is why I’ve been asking this question several times. You caused a lot of headache on yourself and now you think running things as sudo is the solution when it’s what put you in a pickle to begin with.
Let’s deconstruct what you said:
If you couldn’t do that it’s because you were connecting to the share using your user, but for some reason on whatever program you used might have tried the admin busier when you ran the program as root. For the network share it doesn’t matter what user is on your local machine, so this is an issue on how you’re accessing the share on your user, not with needing to run the program as root
Of course, if you ran the above with sudo any file copied over will be owned by root, so now your regular user can’t edit them
I imagine you mean files copied over with the above problem, so same thing applies.
Formatting thumb drives can absolutely be done without running the while program on root, why do you think you need this? How are you trying to do that?
I can imagine, I’ve seen people run things like
sudo npm installand now they have issues because their node folder is owned by root, it’s very similar to what you’re experiencing, a small issue at the beginning triggered an avalanche of issues because you ran one program with sudo. Do you see why everyone is very cautiously asking why do you think you need this?See how this was an XY problem? You’re asking how to add a “run as administrator” but what you actually want is to access a network share with your user. I don’t mean any of this in a bad tone, but there’s a reason people keep asking you why, it’s because what you’re asking is almost never a good idea and leads to problems such as this, imagine if you had been able to create that menu item? You would start using it and getting more and more files owned as root that would cause you to need this more and more until you end up just running everything on root.
Just saw your edit. One thing you should be doing is taking ownership of directories you plan to be working in. So for an external drive for example, you’d want to make sure your user(s) have r/w/x permission recursively (granting permission for all files and folders underneath using the same command) on the root folder of the drive then you can move stuff on and off freely.
I agree it could be more straightforward, but ideally you’d only have to do it one time when you first use the drive with that machine
The permissions problem was likely created by running something as root. You have a chicken and the egg problem my friend.