How can I make runas.exe (Windows) wait until the program it starts exits?

Question

That is, I want runas to exit only after the program that it runs exits.

There is no /wait argument to runas.exe. I've tried lots of permutations of start /wait with it and nothing works.

I have to use runas because I need elevated privileges for the program, so I need to start it like this:

runas /user:administrator /savedcred /env update.exe

where update.exe is my program. runas is being called from a Cygwin Bash, as well, to make it even more complicated.

I'm on Server 2008 R2.

Well, this is one way to solve it. It uses the Sysinternals pslist program and Bash:

do_update()
{
if test -d c:/; then
    case `hostname` in
    thor*)
        update="runas /user:administrator /savedcred /env \".\\update.exe\""
        ;;
        *)  update="./update.exe" ;;
    esac
    $update
    while pslist -e update > /dev/null 2>&1; do
        echo waiting for update.exe to finish...
    sleep 3
    done
else
    ./update.sh
fi
}

It is horribly hacky, though, mainly because it cannot get the exit status of the program back to the caller. That is a huge problem, IMO.

Answer 1

RunAs does not elevate a process, but merely runs the process with target user credentials. But this does not run the process with an elevated token. What you are trying to do with Runas is impossible.

To do this, you need to use either PowerShell, VBScript or download the Elevation PowerToys from Technet.

Edit:

For example, type:

runas /user:<i>Workadmin</i> cmd

Then run fsutils, which requires administrator privileges; access denied.

Or try:

runas /user:<i>workadmin</i> "mmc.exe gpedit.msc"

Access denied.

I'm surprised you haven't noticed this because it causes all sorts of issues when running scripts. If scripts launch other scripts which then requires elevated permissions, then it will break. This is also an issue with VBScripts and PowerShell scripts.