I found a (lengthy) guide to doing this but it is for gksu which is gone. I have to imagine there’s an easy way. I am running Ubuntu. There is no specific use case, it is just a feature I miss from windows.
EDIT: I always expect a degree of hostility and talking-down from the desktop Linux community, but the number of people in this thread telling me I am using my own computer that I bought with my own money in a way they don’t prefer while ignoring my question is just absurd and frankly should be deeply embarrassing for all of us. I have strongly defended the desktop Linux community for decades, but this experience has left a sour taste in my mouth.
Thank you to the few of you who tried to assist without judgement or assumptions.
I’m assuming you’re using the nautilus file manager. I found this post in adding right click actions to nautilus: https://askubuntu.com/questions/210192/how-can-you-add-an-item-to-the-right-click-menu-in-nautilus-without-nautilus-ac#672553 You could make a bash script like shown in the post and use polkit to open the password prompt and run a command as root.