November 29th, 2004

Why doesn’t the RunAs program accept a password on the command line?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The RunAs program demands that you type the password manually. Why doesn’t it accept a password on the command line?

This was a conscious decision. If it were possible to pass the password on the command line, people would start embedding passwords into batch files and logon scripts, which is laughably insecure.

In other words, the feature is missing to remove the temptation to use the feature insecurely.

If this offends you and you want to be insecure and pass the password on the command line anyway (for everyone to see in the command window title bar), you can write your own program that calls the CreateProcessWithLogonW function.

(I’m told that there is a tool available for download which domain administrators might find useful, though it solves a slightly different problem.)

Category
Old New Thing
Topics
Other

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

0 comments

Discussion are closed.

Read next