Using sudo commands in Cocoa and Objective-C?

Question

What is the proper way to run something like $sudo touch folder_name or $sudo rm from within Objective-C/Cocoa? I'm changing and moving around a few files and need elevated privileges. Any code sample would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

One way to do it is AuthorizationExecuteWithPrivileges(), but that's discouraged for the normal course of things. Mainly it's for installers, I gather.

Something like:

AuthorizationRef auth = NULL;
OSStatus err = AuthorizationCreate(NULL, kAuthorizationEmptyEnvironment, kAuthorizationFlagInteractionAllowed, &auth);
err = AuthorizationExecuteWithPrivileges(auth, command, kAuthorizationFlagDefaults, args, NULL);

And you add appropriate checking of err...

See the Authorization documentation.

Answer 2

There are several ways to do this. Which one you choose depends on what you want to do. The simplest and unsafest way is to simple set the s-bit on an extra helper tool that you call from your code and does what needs admin rights. Take a look at the BetterAuthorizationSample for the most fancy and complicated way of executing privileged code.

The Authorization Services Programming Guide gives you all you need.