How to switch to gain root privileges in Nautilus file browser by typing in the addressbar in GUI while it's being used

Question

I saw in a reddit comment that it was possible to switch to root user in nautilus file browser by just typing in a series of forward slashes and colons. I've since forgotten the sequence and searching the internet did not return any answers.

Is there an actual way to do that?

Solution 1

You may want to use the GVfs admin backend, just add admin:// to the beginning of the full path to your preferred directory.

Open Nautilus the usual way and press Ctrl+L to enable typing in the address-bar, and then enter for example admin:///usr/ to open the /usr/ directory.

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Alternatively, launch Terminal and run

nautilus admin:///

to open the / directory or

nautilus admin:///usr/

to open the /usr/ directory etc.

Solution 2

You can go to the root folder / and double click the folder called root. Then, write your password two times and you'll get into the root folder. Then you can see / at the top of the screen. Click at that and now you are in a root instance of Nautilus.

Comments

[pomsky]

Won't work with older Ubuntu releases.

[user68186]

Thanks! Now I have added a section about using GVFS backend in my answer to How do I start Nautilus as root?