What's a reliable and efficient way to determine programmatically if the shell that's running has elevated privileges?
Or if you prefer, how can I tell if the shell was started with "Run as administrator"? I'm looking for a solution that's reliable across installations and OS versions. I want it also to be fairly fast, so it can be used for example in setting shell prompts. There's a SuperUser thread[1] that talks about this. None of the solutions seems completely satisfactory: 1. Run a command that only an Administrator can run, and check the return status. But which one? Suggestions are: a. at. But at may not be on the $PATH, or supported. b. touch /cygdrive/c/Users/.x , or some other protected path. But which paths are protected is installation-dependent (as is the /cygdrive prefix). c. editrights -l. On my host my unprivileged account can't even run this, so I get a return status of 1. In a privileged shell I get 0 or 2. Is that reliable? d. ?? 2. Parse the output of groups or id -G. I can't find any reliable way to do this. For example on my host, when I start a shell with "Run as administrator", the new group I get isn't 544 (Administrators). It's 114 (Local account and member of Administrators group). Is that at all portable or reliable? What other ways are there? Thanks, Andrew [1] http://superuser.com/questions/660191/how-to-check-if-cygwin-mintty-bash-is-run-as-administrator -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
