There are times during software development when you want to run in interactive mode with maximum privileges on a system, be God as it were. One might think running as Administrator would do it but it doesn't. To be truly omnipotent on Windows, you have to run under the LocalSystem account^[1]. It is easy enough with Tcl and this post shows you how. As a side bonus, it also describes how to inject processes into the interactive user's desktop to run under the user's account as well.

One of the strengths of Tcl is the ease of integration with other software, whether they be COM components, libraries or even executable programs that are not designed for interaction with other programs. Here we look the facilities Tcl offers related to the last of these -- running external programs and optionally interacting with them using standard I/O mechanisms.