---
title: "zenity(1) for AI agents to ask for sudo"
description: "A way to effortlessly and securely make AI agent prompt you for sudo password during graphical sessions"
canonical_url: "https://neg4n.dev/brain/zenity-for-ai-agents-to-ask-for-sudo"
md_url: "https://neg4n.dev/brain/zenity-for-ai-agents-to-ask-for-sudo.md"
section: "brain"
date_published: "2026-09-24T22:42:00.000Z"
last_updated: "2026-09-24T22:49:34.641Z"
reading_time: "4 min read"
tags: ["zenity","sudo","nixos","homelab","server"]
---

# zenity(1) for AI agents to ask for sudo

## Few words about the environment

I have a Thinkpad as my home lab central server that is running inside my local network. Apart from running other, non-graphical stuff there I usually keep an open RustDesk connection to do some maintenance or to modify my nixOS settings.

 I like to have a peep what is being done in the background when watching a Netflix series or physically sit in front of it, click the best laptop keyboard (yes) and look at the horrible LCD screen running i3-wm. For the love of the game I guess.

In contrary to my main work machine, on Thinkpad - AI agents run there with full permissions granted. I treat that device as an ephemeral computing environment. There is no stuff that could be broken there nor remote accesses that would ever allow important stuff being modified by not-supervised agent.[^1]

[^1]: More on that on upcoming post about my entire home lab setup

## The problem and inconvenience

Apart all of early "full access" claims, the agent will not execute `sudo` commands out of the box..  and during many agentic loop turns *(especially when doing mentioned system maintenance)* it becomes cumbersome to have

1. Agent to stop the loop *(that sometimes been running for \~1h)*.
2. Agent to ask me to run certain stuff by hand, then to paste output to the chat.

For *(obviously)* I would never type and then save the password to any environment variable, command argument, file or chat. I doubt it could even be productively picked up by the agent's PTY.

## The solution

[`zenity(1)`](https://linux.die.net/man/1/zenity) - not only cool name of the utility. It is a stupidly simple and effective GTK-based GUI helper for shell scripts. It has been around with us for \~22 years [^2]. We can make advantage of it by creating a sudo-runner wrapper script and AGENTS.md entry and guidelines.. or both!

### nixOS wrapper command source

```nix
sudoGuiAskpass = pkgs.writeShellScript "sudo-gui-askpass" ''
  exec ${pkgs.zenity}/bin/zenity --password \
    --title="''${SUDO_GUI_TITLE:-Sudo authentication}" \
    --text="''${SUDO_GUI_SUBTITLE:-Enter your sudo password}" \
    --width=360
'';

sudoGui = pkgs.writeShellApplication {
  name = "sudo-gui";
  text = ''
    if [ "$#" -eq 0 ]; then
      echo "Usage: sudo-gui COMMAND [ARG ...]" >&2
      exit 2
    fi
    if [ -z "''${DISPLAY:-}''${WAYLAND_DISPLAY:-}" ]; then
      echo "No graphical session; use sudo in a terminal instead." >&2
      exit 1
    fi
    export SUDO_ASKPASS=${sudoGuiAskpass}
    exec /run/wrappers/bin/sudo -A "$@"
  '';
};

```

### Agent's instructions in markdown

You can put that anywhere in your project where you want to use zenity for the same purpose I do. In my case, it is living inside `AGENTS.md` directly in my nixOS configuration.

```md
# Home Agent Notes

## Sudo from a non-terminal session

Use `sudo-gui COMMAND [ARG ...]` when a graphical session is available but the
agent's command runner has no terminal for `sudo` to prompt in. Set a short,
task-specific title and subtitle for each invocation, for example:

```bash
SUDO_GUI_TITLE="Rebuild NixOS" \
SUDO_GUI_SUBTITLE="Enter your sudo password to activate the new configuration" \
sudo-gui homelab-rebuild test
```

The subtitle becomes Zenity's dialog text. `sudo-gui` uses Zenity through
`sudo -A`; the password is not stored in a file, environment variable, or
command argument. The user enters it in the local dialog, never in chat. Do
not put secrets in the labels.

Use ordinary `sudo` in an interactive terminal. If the dialog is canceled or
there is no graphical session, stop and report that authentication was not
available. Never use this helper to skip approval for a destructive command.

## Other Zenity dialogs

Use `zenity` for graphical dialogs in this desktop session. Always set a
task-specific `--title`. For `--question`, `--info`, and `--progress`, also set
`--text` to explain the action. Zenity has no `--subtitle` option. For
`--text-info`, put the context in the title and piped content. Do not include
secrets in titles or dialog descriptions.

Quote arguments and handle the dialog's exit status: cancellation or closing
must not be treated as consent or a successful input. When piping text into
`--text-info` or updates into `--progress`, label the operation in the title
and text, and preserve the producer's failure status (for Bash, use
`set -o pipefail`). Never pipe a password to `sudo`; use `sudo-gui` for that.
If there is no graphical session, report that the dialog is unavailable.

```


This way stuff that needs explicit escalation can be prompted via `zenity`, along with the description and title to quickly have look of what is being done without crawling through the agent's transcript.

[^2]: If you want to dig a bit into the history - I believe `zenity` is a rewrite of GNOME 1's `gdialog`. The project may started earlier though according to the Debian's package description, the archive of releases date back to 2004.

![Terminal output shows sudo-gui running fsck.vfat on a USB drive, with arrows pointing to the timeout 120s command and the caption “zenity wrapper for running sudo.”](https://assets.neg4n.dev/zenity-agent-wrapper.png)

*OpenAI's Codex calling the sudo-gui wrapper over zenity*

## How does it look in practice

![A “Sudo authentication” dialog prompts for a password, with Cancel and OK buttons, over a terminal window.](https://assets.neg4n.dev/zenity-dialog.png)

*zenity's sudo password prompt as a floating window over a tilling wm*

## Want to talk about the article?

[X / @igorklepacki](https://x.com/igorklepacki) · [neg4n@icloud.com](mailto:neg4n@icloud.com)