# Run MTR on MacOS without sudo

Coming from Linux/Windows it rather feel bothersome to run `mtr` with `sudo` each time if you want to quickly diagnosis a hostname/IP address.

Since, `mtr` require access to raw packets. MacOS permissions doesn't allow it to access those raw packets without `sudo`, fortunately we can fix that by setting ownership of executables to **root** and **SUID** by following steps -

## Step 1: Find path of mtr executables

First we need to find the path of `mtr-packet` which is another program which handles the networking and does the actual tracing.

```zsh
command -v mtr-packet
/opt/homebrew/sbin/mtr-packet
```

Here we can see, it's residing at `/opt/homebrew/sbin` directory, but that's not the true location of it, let's figure out why!

```zsh
ls -lsh $(command -v mtr-packet)
0 lrwxr-xr-x 1 jugal admin 34 Aug 31 23:28 /opt/homebrew/sbin/mtr-packet -> ../Cellar/mtr/0.96/sbin/mtr-packet
```

Ah, we can see `/opt/homebrew/sbin/mtr-packet` is actually linked to `/opt/homebrew/Cellar/mtr/0.96/sbin/mtr-packet`, that's where we are going to apply the necessary permissions.

## Step 2: Change ownership of executables to root

Change ownership of `mtr-packet` to `root` user by issuing following command -

```zsh
sudo chown root /opt/homebrew/Cellar/mtr/0.96/sbin/mtr-packet
```

## Step 3: Set SUID bit

We also need to set SUID (Set User ID) to `4755` -

```zsh
sudo chmod 4755 /opt/homebrew/Cellar/mtr/0.96/sbin/mtr-packet
```

Run the `mtr` command again, and it should work without prompting you for `sudo` password.

**Note:** The paths given as example are taken from Homebrew on M4 cores, Mac Intel architecture's path may differ.

***Reference(s):***

* [Dave's Network Blog](https://blog.dave-bell.co.uk/2020/01/06/using-mtr-on-os-x-without-sudo/)
* [Dzubayyan's Articles](https://article.masdzub.com/how-to-use-mtr-without-sudo-macos.aspx/)