Microsoft embraces its inner penguin as sudo sneaks into Windows 11 Microsoft has accidentally announced the arrival of sudo in Windows, bringing to an end fervent industry chatter about the tool emerging in the company's flagship operating system. According to the now-deleted post, the component is due to arrive in the Canary Channel of the Windows 11 Insider program. The build number …
The next logical step, for true sudo should be:
sudo delete_microsoft_carp.sh
That should leave us with all Microsoft carp removed, except WSL and logon application.
Hopefully after that Microshaft will supply embedded X11 server so we could properly install a window manager of our choice.
The last step should probably be removal of NT kernel and replacement with native Linux kernel.
Rather wondering how that saying should be restated, for a *nix that's busily swinging over to re-inventing more and more of Windows (a SystemD ref, just in case it's needed)...
Should anyone wish to contribute such a restatement, perhaps it's best expressed as the regular expression required to ammend the old to the new.
...but I have to wonder why now? What are they up to that this extremely obvious addition has finally made the cut after, what, three decades?
Says a lot about how I've come to view Microsoft that I view even what appears to be on the face of it good news with abject suspicion.
I don't know. I've seen and participated in many arguments with other Linux users who think sudo is a bad idea and it should only be su. I disagree with that, but it's not just one person who thinks that. That's effectively what Windows had before, and it was pretty easy for a program that needed administrator to ask to elevate itself, effectively allowing them to act like there was a sudo option. Maybe Microsoft thought that was enough for a while, and while I prefer the functionality that sudo provides, it's not a necessity.
Lots of people have implemented bash for Windows. It's not hard to use one of those. Of course, bash doesn't include sudo, it runs the sudo you already have, so you'd need someone to make sudo for Windows. Fortunately, Microsoft appear to have done that, so if they implemented it as a program and not a shell command, bash for Windows can use sudo too.
As for PowerShell, I don't like it very much, but I can't pretend that bash is somehow perfect. Its peculiarities are mostly just things that I've had more experience getting around. PowerShell, while ugly, has more support for handling complex data types and objects that can be treated as objects instead of serializing and deserializing them in turns so you can pass them around. Sometimes, this can be helpful.
I have often considered that the BEST kind of windows would be an MS desktop running on Linux or one of the BSD's, much like Apple with OSX
WIthin this you would only need a native X11 server (one that supports 'DISPLAY' and remote clients, of course) in addition to the Win32 API as a layer to the kernel AND for regular Win32 programs.
In effect, an MS-blessed version of WINE.
One of the annoying things that happens with elevated command prompts in Windows is that it sort-of disconnects all your mapped drives within the elevated sessions. I believe RunAs does the same thing. There is a registry setting to defeat it, but it is still annoying anyway you flavor it.
Windows has had a 'sudo' command for years now, it's part of the Sysinternals Suite and is called psexec (or psexec64 - for x64 systems).
This new sudo probably means Microsoft is starting now to integrate (or...*cough* embrace, extend, extinguish?) the Sysinternals functions / tools into the baseline windows installation?
i've been using psexec quite nicely to run cmd.exe as SYSTEM account for years: "psexec64 -sdi cmd.exe" and up pops a terminal window that can run anything with superuser rights (SYSTEM).
It can also run things as other user accounts when appropriate parameters are provided.
If you need Linux like functionality on Windows then there's always been Cygwin. The neat thing about this package is that the shell commands also works from the Windows command line (although you'd normally be working inside bash if you're running shell commands or scripts).
Cygwin is likely the reason why Microsoft started adding their pseudo-Linux to Windows. As such its a true "embrace, extend, extinguish" addition because its sufficiently genuine to look like the real thing but it really isn't. I was surprised at what it couldn't do, it gave me the impression that its primary purpose was to hold the line, to keep people corralled in Windows while those proprietary tweaks are gradually added. (That's the trick to Powershell -- its almost like Bash but not at all like it at the same time so while you can take Bash scripts and run them under Cygwin you can't do anything with Powershiell outside of a Windows environment.)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2026
