A novice PowerShell module that provides cmdlet and process elevation without creating a new console window.
Available on PSGallery. Try it out with:
Install-Module -Name InvokeAsAdmin -Repository PSGallery -Scope CurrentUserSo here's how it works: In order to run an administrative command and get the contents on the same command-line in Windows NT, some clever trickery needs to happen. Because of the ways that user and process management are currently implemented, you cannot start a process with only the security privileges of another user; you have to explicitly execute the process as the other user.
While it is novel to start a process as another user, especially with the powershell.exe -runas flag, it is another level of conventional difficulty to return the command output to the original console instance.
This is where kernel IPC comes into play: by setting up a named pipe in the admin process, output can be returned through said pipe to the user process.
The Invoke-AsAdmin cmdlet executes the command specified by the arguments as an elavated user.
When the command is a single string, it is executed by the Invoke-Expression cmdlet. Otherwise, the ampersand (&) shell command is used.
The command line is then executed in an elavated process that is different from the caller. The output is serialized and transfered as a pipeline stream to the caller. If the output is not serializable, it is converted to a text stream by means of the Out-String cmdlet.
The Invoke-AsAdmin cmdlet will not open a new console window. Instead, it executes the command utilizing the same console session as the caller process. All environment variables are evaluated in the context of the caller process.
Invoke-AsAdmin {Get-Process -IncludeUserName | Sort-Object UserName | Select-Object UserName, ProcessName}This will obtain a process list with user name information, sorted by UserName. Because the System.Diagnostics.Process objects are not serializable, if you want to transform the output of Get-Process, enclose the command with curly braces to ensure that pipeline processing should be done in the called process.
Invoke-AsAdmin {cmd /c mklink $env:USERPROFILE\bin\test.exe test.exe}This will reate a symbolic link to test.exe in the $env:USERPROFILE\bin folder. Note that $env:USERPROFILE is evaluated in the context of the caller process.
I'm just a novice user who codes for fun. This was originally put together by a user named msumimz, however I have been unable to find them online and the original posts for this code have disappeared as far as I have been able to search. I saved this several years ago and have hacked a bit with it ever since. I took it down for a year after some unfairly critical feedback, but have decided to repost it. Here's the code with the author's credit and it's original license. Hopefully I'll find the time to fix it all up.