Elevator

Windows process launcher supporting elevate up or down, hide, wait and it's NOT a Console app (built as Windows GUI exe) which avoids creating unsightly default console window - yet will create console to show usage and debug output where requested

Usage

Elevator [options] prog [args]
-?    - Shows this help
-v    - debug mode
-wait - Waits until prog terminates
-hide - Launches with hidden window
-elev - specify elevation change (from host process):
          name.exe - elevate same as existing name.exe
          low      - force low (going high to low precludes -wait option).
          high     - force high
-dir  - working directory
-c    - Launches via %COMSPEC% /s /c prog "args"
        (/s removes the outer quotes and persists everything else; see 'help cmd.exe')
prog  - The program to execute
args  - Optional command line arguments to prog

Motivation

Looking to launch DevEnv.exe to edit files from command line, with minimal UAC prompting, no matter whether DevEnv or cmd is currently elevated. Notably, DevEnv is conveniently single instance by default. There are basically 4 possible combinations of elevation going from the current cmd.exe process to the possibly running DevEnv.exe process:

cmd	DevEnv	transition required
low	high	this is kinda the main typical route; no way to avoid UAC prompt
high	low	this required the shifting down trick, i.e. lauching by proxy thru another low process (e.g. explorer.exe) no UAC prompt required
low	low	really nothing special to be done here, just launch with cmd.exe's current elevation
high	high	ditto
either	not running	ditto

Attribution

Taking no credit here.

• started with jpassing/elevate
• added in Raymond Chen's approach of dropping from elevated to unelevated via Explorer->ShellExecute
• cobbled together various stack-o's attributed in the main Elevator.cpp
  • notably the approach of building as a Windows GUI exe to avoid showing undesirable default console windows, yet attaching to an existing cmd.exe console if one is present.

Solution is compiling on Visual Studio 2017 v15.4.0 with Desktop C++ workload installed.

I should mention, I am not at all a C++ programmer. This code is likely to be riddled with copy-paste bugs and inefficiencies.

Open with DevEnv.reg

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Open with DevEnv]
"icon"="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\2017\\Enterprise\\Common7\\IDE\\devenv.exe"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Open with DevEnv\command]
@="c:\\bin\\Elevator.exe -elev devenv.exe \"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\2017\\Enterprise\\Common7\\IDE\\devenv.exe\" /edit \\\"%1\\\""

edit.cmd (put in your path)

@echo off
SETLOCAL

set editor="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /edit

if exist %1 goto :skipCreate
set doNew=y
set /p doNew=Create new file? [y] 
if "%doNew%"=="y" (echo.>%1) else goto :EOF
:skipCreate

Elevator -dir "%cd%" -elev %editor% \"%1\"

another handy usage

associate .bat files with hidden launch (use .cmd for normal operation)

assoc .bat=ElevatorHiddenBatch
ftype ElevatorHiddenBatch=c:\bin\elevator.exe -hide -c \"%1\"