Check for administrator privileges in C#

Question

I want to know if a program is running as administrator.

The user doesn't have to be administrator. I only want to know if my application has rights to edit some secured files that are editable when running as Administrator.

Society

possible duplicate of How can I tell if my process is running As Administrator? – Wittol

I just Googled that question and it looks like I asked it 3 years ago. Good to know. Thanks Google. – Society

Answer 1

This will return a bool valid

using System.Security.Principal;

bool isElevated;
using (WindowsIdentity identity = WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent())
{
    WindowsPrincipal principal = new WindowsPrincipal(identity);
    isElevated = principal.IsInRole(WindowsBuiltInRole.Administrator);
}

Scintillant

+1 because that even works on Linux (Mono). Gives you true when ran as root/via sudo. Gives false as a default user. – Bang

If you build for .NET 5.0, you get: error CA1416: This call site is reachable on all platforms. 'WindowsBuiltInRole.Administrator' is only supported on: 'windows'. – Underpinning

Answer 2

Here's @atrljoe's answer turned into a one liner using the latest C#:

using System.Security.Principal;

static bool IsElevated => new WindowsPrincipal(WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent()).IsInRole(WindowsBuiltInRole.Administrator);

Nanna

This is ugly. I'm sorry. But really, you should shorten everythiing. It is bette to leave it as 4 lines and make function out of it. How to even debug your one liner? – Society

I believe that terseness is a vitue, as long as it's clear. – Nanna

Interesting... I find this easier to read than the expanded version. This has a clear call hierarchy, whereas to understand code exploded into different variables, I need to mentally execute it. – Disharmonious

Another downside of this form is that you never call Dispose as you are required by contract to do – Bedpan

My downvote is because it isn't disposed of, as Ian said. – Bombe

Not only is it ugly, it's not clear what it does. I'm in the "clear and concise even if it takes more lines of code" boat. – Bouquet

This exact code would be ten times more readable if it were just made multi-line. Comments won't allow formatting, but if you insert a carriage return directly after the => operator, and after the Windows Principle constructor call, readability would be vastly better. Irrelevant, though, because you really do have to dispose that WindowsIdentity. – Underpinning

You're not disposing it... – Filigree

Answer 3

To avoid SecurityException, and leaks, like not closing WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent(), since WindowsPrincipal does not explicitly close, but only creates a new connection and only then closes it.

private static bool IsAdministrationRules() {
   try {
       using (WindowsIdentity identity = WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent()) {
          return (new WindowsPrincipal(identity)).IsInRole(WindowsBuiltInRole.Administrator);
       }
   } catch {
       return false;
   }
}

Pessa