[clarkgoble]

Weird question. I have an Applescript that needs to execute a few shell commands as root. Now I can think of a few ways to do this. The easiest, of course, is simply to add yourself to sudoers so that you don't need to enter a password.

I was, however, curious of more general solutions.

[Camelot]

The do shell script event has the option to execute as root:

do shell script "<script goes here>" withadministrator privileges

It'll ask the user for their password before it executes.

According to the AppleScript dictionary, there should also be a 'with password <string>' option, but I can't seem to get that to work for some reason.

[clarkgoble]

Yes that does it, but it asks for permissions for every call to do shell script. Here's the problem. The command is inside a repeat. It's basically a small script to change the permissions of a bunch of files.

Code:

on open itemList
	
	set quot to ASCII character 34
	
	repeat with thisItem in itemList
		
		do shell script ("sudo chmod auo+rw " & quot & POSIX path of thisItem & quot) 
		do shell script ("sudo chown clarkgoble " & quot & POSIX path of thisItem & quot) 
		
	end repeat
	
end open

As I said, I simply modified sudoers and it runs great. I just was curious if there was a way to ask for administrator priviledges only once for the script.

[Camelot]

Originally posted by clarkgoble:
[snip]As I said, I simply modified sudoers and it runs great. I just was curious if there was a way to ask for administrator priviledges only once for the script.

Using the with password syntax seems to work for me, so you could:

Code:
set thePW to text returned of (display dialog "Enter your administrator password:" default answer "")

try
do shell script "chmod a+w..." password thePW with administrator privileges
do shell script "chown..." password thePW with administrator privileges
on error
display dialog "Oops. Wrong password?"
end try

[clarkgoble]

That's a good idea except that it displays your password as you type it. Does Applescript have a password dialog box the way Javascript does?

As I said, it isn't that big a deal. The sudoers solution seemed best. It was interesting to come up against these limitations however.