It’ll give you Administrative privileges, but will keep all the changes in the current profile instead of the account you’re using to run the command with. This is really handy if you like to use elevated permissions for installing apps or making changes to user locations like My Documents, etc.

The only difference is that Sudo for Windows “preserves the user’s profile and ownership of created objects” as stated by the developer. Sudo for Windows is a free program you can install that will give you the same experience of the sudo command on Linux for Windows. If you want true elevated privileges like sudo without the profile issues, check out the next alternative below. So if you install an application by right-clicking on the EXE file and choosing Run as Administrator, it’ll get installed to the built-in Administrator user profile, not the one you are logged into. If you log into X and then do a runas using the Administrator credentials, changes will be made to the Administrator’s settings, not user X. For example, let’s say you have user X who is a normal user and user Y, who is an administrator. Note that when using runas command, if you install a program or make changes to settings, etc., the changes will be made to the user account that you are running the command on. You can checkout the Technet page on runas for more information on how to use it. If you wanted to open a text file using Notepad with administrator privileges, you could use this command: runas /user:Administrator 'notepad my_file.txt' You can remove that if you need access to the user environment variables. noprofile will not load the current user profile.

If you wanted to open an administrative command prompt, you could type the following: runas /noprofile /user:Administrator cmd

Windows terminal commands vs linux