Question

I have a runnable jar file, that I start with

java -jar myFile.jar

on Windows. A customer stated that he had problems starting the application (which is this jar file wrapped into an executable). I have the suspicion that it has something to do with admin rights. So I’d like to run my jar file without admin rights for testing purposes (because this way I get the System.out/err which helps greatly for debugging).

I realize that I can just create a non-admin account and start the application there, but I’d like to know if there is a way to specifically start a jar from an admin account so that it doesn’t have admin rights in the console. Or alternatively: Is there a way to open up a console that has no admin rights from an admin account?

The customer uses Windows XP, so this is the operating system that I can use. (Although if you know something in a newer Windows like Win7, I appreciate it if you would tell me too).

EDIT: To clarify: I am looking for something like this

java -jar -runWithoutAdminRights myFile.jar

or

start /runWithoutAdminRights java -jar myFile.jar

or a way to open up a non-admin console from an admin account.

Answer 1

The Runas command definitely looks like the way to go.

I believe the way to go about this would be to first check the trust level options available to you:

runas /showtrustlevels

You should get something like the following:

C:\Windows\system32>runas /showtrustlevels
The following trust levels are available on your system:
0x20000 (Basic User)

You would then take the value for “Basic User” and run something like the following to start java:

runas /trustlevel:0x20000 "java -jar myFile.jar"