How to force policy-kit agent to show full information about command line arguments

Question

I am using Ubuntu Mate 20.04 and pkexec to launch apps with admin privileges if needed.

However, when policy agent kit asking to authorize request, there is no enough information to make a decision. For example, if I run

pkexec sh -c 'echo hello'

I'll see this promt:

Note that there is no information about the command I'm trying to execute. So, it would look like the same for dangerous

pkexec sh -c 'rm -rf /'

How can I tweak my setup by configuring or changing agent so I can see more information (e.g. full command line) about action I'm asked to authorize?

Answer 1

The variable responsible for full command line with arguments is command_line. To change it, one can create a custom policy as man pkexec page suggests.

However, I've ended up editing LC_MESSAGES. My locale is en_US, so I've done these steps:

1. copied /usr/share/locale-langpack/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/polkit-1.mo
2. unpacked it with msgunfmt polkit-1.mo -o polkit-1.po
3. edited polkit-1.po

msgid "Authentication is needed to run `$(program)' as the super user"
msgstr "Authentication is needed to run '$(program)' as the super user"

to

msgid "Authentication is needed to run `$(program)' as the super user"
msgstr "Authentication is needed to run '$(program)' ('$(command_line)') as the super user"

and several similar lines too.

4. packed it back with msgfmt polkit-1.po -o polkit-1.mo
5. put it into /usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/polkit-1.mo
6. restarted polkit daemon systemctl restart polkit

And now I can get the full command