There have been rumors about it in recent days, but Now it’s official, “sudo” can soon be invoked from the Windows 11 console. And at this point there are two options, depending on whether you have had any contact with Linux or not. In the first case, your response will probably depend on whether you also use Windows or not. If not, you might be surprised that “sudo” wasn’t available in Microsoft’s operating system until now, and if so, it’s quite likely that you were glad to know.

But let’s go to the most interesting, ie. with Windows users who don’t know what sudo is, which is why you might be a little surprised that the arrival of the console command is such an interesting novelty. But of course, to explain this, it is necessary to understand the big difference between Linux and Windows (and their respective communities) when talking about the security of operating system user accounts.

In Windows, the most common use is the administrator account, that is, an account with the authority to perform a huge number of actions, many of which are potentially dangerous. However, in Linux it is most common to use user accounts with permissions limited to what the person usually does. In this way, the risk of accidentally performing malicious actions is avoided, but also that this user account could be misused by malicious third parties if it were to fall into their hands.

Now, what happens when a Linux user with a restricted account wants to perform a command line operation that requires a higher access level than their corresponding access level? The two fastest options are to either open the console as root (the type of account with the highest privilege level on the system, also known as a Super User), or to escalate your privileges directly from the command line. And that’s where sudo comes in.‘.

I’ll ignore the joke that it’s called because the nervousness of using this command makes us sweat even on a cold winter day. In fact, its name is an abbreviation of “SU (Super User) Do”, that is, “Super User does”, and therefore, as you may have deduced, we indicate to the system that the command you will find below must be run as the root user. At that point, of course, the user must authenticate in order for the system to perform this action.

In the picture below this paragraph you can see different reactions (in the same console session) using the command with a normal user account and using the ‘sudo’ command (the ‘whoami’ is the command that tells us which user account we are using at the time):

Having clarified and emphasized that the Linux user generally has a much more developed awareness of the importance of using user accounts with only the necessary permissions to perform the actions corresponding to them, the reason why the arrival of the “sudo” command in Windows 11confirmed by Microsoft and which has already started to be deployed in Preview Build 26052 of the Canary and Dev channels of the insider program.

Moreover, and in the usual Microsoft line, because it “fell in love” with Linux and the free software ecosystem, This project opted for an MIT-type license, so we are talking about an open source project whose repository you can find on GitHub. Of course, given that it’s now debuted on two of the most unstable insider channels, and that Microsoft seems intent on getting the community involved in its development, it’s very likely that we’ll have to wait a little longer, perhaps until the end of the year, until “sudo” reaches the final version of Windows 11.

However, it is important to be clear This Windows ‘sudo’ is neither a fork nor an adaptation of the Linux ‘sudo’, reported in a Microsoft publication. So we have to understand that it started practically from scratch (of course, at least the inspiration comes from Linux sudo), so during these months, if the community is involved, the final result can be very interesting.