This is not likely as there are a number of usability and security concerns with doing this. It's already possible to run the node process with sudo so I'm not sure what additional benefit this would offer.

@jasnell I guess it's theoretically possible with child_process, but how would that even work?

You know how the file manager on Linux prompts you with the password dialog when you're trying to open a protected directory? Let's say the user of your Node.js file manager app wants to do the same, they want to see the contents of their protected directory '/media/sharedDrive/' on Linux and 'C:/test/' on Windows.

How do we implement this? Do you have to create a dummy readdir.js file in your project directory that logs the results of fs.readdirSync() and then get it from the stdout parameter from the result of child_process.exec?

Something like this, with the help of sudo-prompt module, maybe?

const sudo = require('sudo-prompt')
const options = {
  name: 'Electron'
}
const command = 'node "PATH_TO_THE_APP/readdir.js path/to/dir"'
sudo.exec(command,  options, function(error, stdout, stderr) {
  if (error) { throw error }
  console.log(stdout)
})

On Windows, you can't even pass sudo as an argument, you would have to invoke a new cmd or powershell process via powershell with admin rights -Verb RunAs and then pipe stdout from that process back to powershell and then back to the app.

If you know how to do it, please suggest a working solution for this, using existing Node.js methods

Strong -1.

• This would likely require a sudoer's password being within node's address space in plain text, even if temporarily.
• This would likely be a platform compat nightmare.
• If your program needs elevated permissions, run it with elevated permissions.

@devsnek unfortunately you cannot just run Electron apps as root without --no-sandbox parameter, which makes the app dangerous to use.

The only solution I can see is to use Node's child_process to create a new sudo Node process which would somehow request the user password (perhaps using sudo-prompt module) and then run the needed fs function e.g. fs.readdirSync(path) for the specified protected directory and then return the result back into the app via stdout . But as I mentioned in the comment above, I don't really know how to do it properly.

If someone knows how to do it, please share a little code snippet