I’m trying to alter my hosts file in Windows using a bash script.
It looks like this:
echo "<ip_address> <replacement>" >> C:\\Windows\\System32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts
It looks like I need admin permissions, how can I get those? I tried this, but it didn’t work either.
cd C:\\Windows\\System32\\drivers\\etc
chmod +x hosts
echo "<ip_address> <replacement>" >> C:\\Windows\\System32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts
Result
chmod: changing permissions of 'hosts': Permission denied
bin/exec.sh: line 5: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts: Permission denied
Having to accept a pop-up that asks for permissions is acceptable!
>Solution :
It is unfortunately very complicated to achieve this without external tools.
I recommend this very useful tool: https://github.com/gerardog/gsudo – it works like sudo but for Windows.
Note however that gsudo echo .. >> .. won’t be enough because the >> .. part is done by the shell which is not elevated and gsudo probably can’t run echo since that’s a builtin, but gsudo 'bash -c echo .. >> ..' should work:
gsudo 'bash -c echo "<ip_address> <replacement>" >> C:\\Windows\\System32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts'
Note: If this doesn’t work because either your bash.exe is not in your Windows PATH or because despite this being MINGW bash you also have WSL installed and gsudo would start that instead, then you can always use cmd instead of bash:
gsudo 'cmd /c echo "<ip_address> <replacement>" >> C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts'