How To Open A Root Finder Window In MacOSX Snow Leopard
erics, Posted August 14th, 2011 at 12:57:03pm
- In the Terminal application, type the following:
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder
- Then, click on an empty spot on your desktop – NOT in an existing Finder window.
- Now, type Command-N or select New Finder Window from the File menu.
- To end your root Finder session, type ^C in the Terminal window.
Notes:
- You won’t be able to interact with any files you might have on your desktop, as those belong to your logged-in user account and root’s desktop is currently (and transparently) sitting on top of it.
- If you attempt to open/double-click a file which requires root access to read, the corresponding application will open as the logged-in user and the file will fail to open. To get around this, you can launch the app’s /Contents/MacOS executable as root and open the file from within the app.
Another approach I found was to use Applescript, and to add a Quit option to Finder by running the following in Terminal:
sudo defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 |
try do shell script "nohup /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder &" with administrator privileges on error tell application "Finder" activate display alert "Could not spawn Finder as root!" end tell end try |
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