How do you run a command as an administrator from the Windows command line?

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All you have to do is use the runas command to run your program as Administrator (with a caveat).

runas /user:Administrator "cmdName parameters"

In my case, this was

runas /user:Administrator "cmd.exe /C %CD%\installer.cmd %CD%"

Note that you must use Quotation marks, else the runas command will gobble up the switch option to cmd.

Also note that the administrative shell (cmd.exe) starts up in the C:\Windows\System32 folder. This isn’t what I wanted, but it was easy enough to pass in the current path to my installer, and to reference it using an absolute path.

Caveat: Enable the admin account

Using runas this way requires the administrative account to be enabled, which is not the default on Windows 7 or Vista. However, here is a great tutorial on how to enable it, in three different ways:

I myself enabled it by opening Administrative Tools, Local Security Policy, then navigating to Local Policies\Security Options and changing the value of the Accounts: Administrative Account Status policy to Enabled, which is none of the three ways shown in the link.

An even easier way to accomplish this:

C:> net user Administrator /active:yes

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