How do you elevate permissions on a Mac Application using the GUI?

Question

I having trouble with an application not prompting for administrator privileges (thank you Blizzard's WOW installer) and I'm looking for an OS X equivalent of Windows' RunAs.

I am familiar with SUDO, but don't want to use it as it is often a pain to drill down to the relevant binary in the application package.

Answer 1

You can use an application called Pseudo to run any application as root. It's nothing more than a shell for sudo, but will accomplish your goal of not having to dig around in application bundles.

I would not recommend using it in this case, though. Broken program can do far more damage as root than as a normal user, and if the WOW installer isn't doing what it's supposed to when you're not an admin, I wouldn't trust it with root priviliges.

Just run the installer logged in as an admin. If that doesn't help, your problem is somewhere else.

Answer 2

This is probably rare enough that it's not worth going to great lengths to make the process elegant, but you can write a very simple Applescript to elevate an app for you. There are lots of ways to approach it, but if you want it to show you a file picker and then prompt for the Administrator password you could use something like:

set filePath to (POSIX path of (choose file))
do shell script "open \"" & filePath & "\"" with administrator privileges

open will figure out how to find the executable in a App bundle. This will also work with other file types, for instance system configuration files.

You could also make this a droplet or a script menu entry that worked on the current Finder selection. If you add the text: password "yourPass" to the end of the second line then you can suppress the authentication prompt, but I certainly wouldn't recommend that.