Asks password multiple times in succession to upgrade each cask

[dialex]

Yes, I had to input my password 7 times to upgrade one cask 😵

I run brew cu -facy each month. Today for the first time I noticed that brew cu is asking me for the device's password in quick succession. Before it would simply ask me once or twice, for specific casks, usually docker or java. But now it's asks that many times for a single cask. This makes the script unusable.

I'm using the company's laptop, could it that they changed some access policy?

[ondrejfuhrer]

Hey @dialex

Thank you for the question. It's actually quite hard to know what's causing that, I haven't personally experienced that. Could be because of computer policy, could be also related to how the casks are defined.

I'm not sure if there is actually anything we could do about it. We solely rely on brew reinstall --cask XYZ command to do the updates, so we can't really control much.

[AlexanderPavlenko]

If there is a way to know ahead whether a cask requires root to reinstall, maybe consider skipping and postponing them, so that the upgrade doesn't get stuck every other cask, because brew doesn't seem to cache sudo access anymore since that turned out to be a security issue.

[ssbarnea]

In fact I would be quite interested in how to configure it to run in full unattended mode, so the "sudo" prompt would not be needed. I am aware that this might be seen as a security issue but some users might be ok with it, so it should be an opt-in workaround.

Alternatively we should have an option to tag the few packages that need sudo and avoid updating them when in unattended/scripted mode. Any suggestions?

[ondrejfuhrer]

Alternatively we should have an option to tag the few packages that need sudo and avoid updating them when in unattended/scripted mode. Any suggestions?

You can use the cask pinning feature (brew cu pin <cask>) to avoid updating them. So at least part of it is possible.

For the unattended mode, I'm not sure if that's easily possible unless homebrew itself supports that.