Running script with admin permissions on OS X

Question

I've tried my best to find out a solution with the many script questions on Stack Overflow and the internet, but I can't seem to find the solution I need.

What I want to do is create a more automated and less clicking solution to remove all the Mobile cached user accounts on a system. I've been logging in and manually going to user accounts and removing the users one at a time by clicking the "-" button, then clicking "Delete Immediately" for the user data. This works, but is time consuming and I have better things to do with my time. So I knew there had to be a way to do this with a script.

I ran across this code:

for cuser in `dscl . -list /Users AuthenticationAuthority | grep LocalCachedUser | awk '{print $1}' | tr '/n' ' '`; do
    dscl . -delete /Users/$cuser
done

If I run this in terminal I get permission errors. So I figured I need to run it with sudo. So I started looking into creating AppleScripts to run the script, but I can't seem to find the right way to do it.

Any ideas? By the way, I'm new to scripting on the Mac, so please comment your code so I know whats happening, and so I don't just run some script code without know what it'll do. :)

Thanks

Answer 1

To perform a shell script with sudo or administrator privileges append with administrator privileges to the end of your do shell script line. For example:

do shell script "/path/to/script/file.sh" user name "adminusershortname" password "password" with administrator privileges

You can find more on Apple's technote dealing with do shell script

That said, saving this as a shell script and running the shell script using sudo would work just as well.

#! /bin/sh

for cuser in `/usr/bin/dscl . -list /Users AuthenticationAuthority | grep LocalCachedUser | awk '{print $1}' | tr '/n' ' '`; do
    /usr/bin/dscl . -delete /Users/$cuser
done

Save it as say removeUser.sh, use chmod to set it as executable (chmod 755) and then run it (sudo ./removeUser.sh)