MacOS – the bash version shipped with Mountain Lion

OS X doesn't have an entirely clean way to do this, but there are a few ways to fake it. First, AppleScript has a good way to do sudo-ish things based on a graphical authentication, and you can use that:

osascript -e "do shell script \"stufftorunasroot\" with administrator privileges"

You can also use that mechanism to set the sudo timestamp, and then use the regular sudo (within the 5-minute timeout window) to do things:

osascript -e "do shell script \"mkdir -p /var/db/sudo/$USER; touch /var/db/sudo/$USER\" with administrator privileges" && \
    sudo stufftorunasroot

Finally, you can use AppleScript to prompt for a password, then pass that to sudo:

pw="$(osascript -e 'Tell application "System Events" to display dialog "Password:" default answer "" with hidden answer' -e 'text returned of result' 2>/dev/null)" && /
    echo "$pw" | sudo -S stufftorunasroot

OK, having had a good play the following options are possible with Parallels:

1. From the Recovery Partition on your machine, however this only works from the current one, not any other attached ones, so if you are booted into ML, you can only use the ML recovery partition - so no go for Lion
2. From original Media, in this case an official USB stick as it was not available on DVD, I didn't have one, so no good for me (note that hand made ones will not work, neither will if you created a bootable partition
3. From a Disk Image file. As with option 2. above, creating a bootable DVD/USB Stick/partition on an drive etc will not work if you have extracted the image file to create one. You need the actual DMG file. If you have the original App Store download, the easiest way to get this is is to rick click and Show Package Contents, then find the InstallESD.dmg file and make a copy of it.

Using the file from method 3. will allow you to use the new VM Wizard to create the Lion VM