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We've all been there. We opened a file in an editor, spent 5 hours editing it and... "Dammit, didn't sudo..."

Not again! Use escalator to sudo the editor after the fact!

This little kernel module will take the task_struct of the passed process, get it's cred & real_cred and patch them to be root. While in my tests that works awesome, here be dragons and it might not work for you! It was developed towards a 4.18.12-arch1-1-ARCH kernel on Arch Linux. Your results may vary on other kernels.

Note: /sys/kernel/escalate_process is only writable by root!

# Compile
make # You need kernel headers installed!

# Install via
sudo make install
modprobe escalator pid=<pid of process to escalate - Optional>

# Load without install via
sudo insmod ./escalator.ko pid=<pid of process to escalate - Optional>

# Use with helper script:
escalator <pid ...>

# Use manually:
echo <pid> | sudo tee /sys/kernel/escalate_process

• pkill like 'escalate all processes that match X'
• set capabilities
• set any UID/GID desired instead of always setting 0 (root)

Yes

GPL2.0