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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?

pomsky
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prab4th
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    Hello, I've seen that question and I have read it. What I am asking is if there is a way to switch to root while using nautilus by just using the adressbar – prab4th Sep 05 '18 at 15:14
  • what I wanted to do was to gain root priviledges, I've edited the question – prab4th Sep 05 '18 at 15:21
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    There is the nautilus-admin - Nautilus Admin is a simple Python extension for the Nautilus file manager that adds some administrative actions to the right-click menu `sudo apt install nautilus-admin` – oldfred Sep 05 '18 at 16:56

2 Answers2

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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.

enter image description here

Alternatively, launch Terminal and run 

nautilus admin:///

to open the / directory or 

nautilus admin:///usr/

to open the /usr/ directory etc.

pomsky
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  • Won't work with older Ubuntu releases. – pomsky Sep 05 '18 at 15:32
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    Thanks! Now I have added a section about using GVFS backend in my answer to [How do I start Nautilus as root?](https://askubuntu.com/questions/156998/how-do-i-start-nautilus-as-root/868882#868882) – user68186 Sep 05 '18 at 16:43
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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.

pomsky
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adazem009
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