Open Terminal Here, as Root (OS X)

Question

There is a pretty awesome applescript called "Open Terminal Here" ( http://www.entropy.ch/software/applescript/ ) which you can add to your finder's toolbar and click when you want to launch a terminal console which is set to that directory.

Sometimes I need to be root, and so I end up starting terminal, doing something like sudo -i and then I have to change back to the previous directory because the sudo command is landing me in /var/root.

I'm using sudo -i because I like it to load things like aliases / the bash profile.

The script is applescript, and here's the important part of how it works:

    ...
    set cmd to "cd " & quoted form of the_path & " && echo $'\\ec'"
    ...
    tell application "Terminal"
        activate
        do script with command cmd

How do I get this to load as root?

Answer 1

What's the directory you're trying to get to? The home alias ('~') doesn't work as root, so you might need to use an absolute path.

To use AppleScript to launch Terminal as root you could do something like the following (untested!):

tell application "Terminal"
    activate
    tell application "System Events" to keystroke "sudo -i" & return
    do script with command cmd

This will grant you administrator privileges before running the code that changes to the open Finder directory. That could be pretty risky if you weren't careful about the scripts you were running.

More generally, you can get AppleScript to do sudo commands with code like this:

set shellOutput to do shell script cmd with administrator privileges
display dialog shellOutput

where 'cmd' is the command to run. (This also displays a popup of the code results.)

Answer 2

It was actually quite complicated to figure out, but I ended up adding this to my /etc/profile file:

directory=`pbpaste`
if [ -d "$directory" ]; then
    cd "$directory"
fi

After that I used the "Open Terminal Here" script and simply modified it so that it copies the current path to the clipboard before launching the terminal

    tell application "Finder" to set the clipboard to the_path

and then I added the sudo -i part to the code where it activates terminal:

    set cmd to "cd " & quoted form of the_path & " && echo $'\\ec' && sudo -i"

    tell application "Terminal"

So, the path will be copied to the clipboard, I can use an icon to launch the applescript, and then when the profile is loaded (for root) it will change to the directory.