Jan 24 2011

cacls

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 7:14 pm

When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

When the ACL resetting is done, when the permissions aren’t so fubarred anymore…

OK, that is a bit of a strained link from cacls (and the icacls command line utility (used since Vista I think?) that seems to be a bit like the chmod command on linux boxes) to witches (cackles), but I’ve been meaning to post this snippet of info for more than a year now, and never got around to it, sorry.

Scenario: You take your portable hard drive (with at least one NTFS formatted partition) to a friends house, and try to open a file. Their installation gives you an error message (mine was in Russian, sorry I can’t remember specifics) that basically complains you don’t have the required rights/permissions to look at those pictures/documents etc. You haven’t ever deliberately locked down the files, and intend to return to your friend’s house again.

Solution: Return to your PC, re-attach the hard drive. Drop to a command line (cmd, you may need to run as administrator for the following command?), and change to the drive and directory that was misbehaving on someone else’s computer. enter the following command

icacls * /T /Q /C /RESET

Now, when you next take the hard drive away, you should be able to open the files that were locked down before.

2 Responses to “cacls”

  1. Bhumika says:

    Hi Chris,

    please add me on skype as bare-in-bbhuptani I am from India and working as a recruiter in Bare-international India office. Need to recruit some persons in Astana for a market research. Could you please help me out for this? I hope you will…. Awaiting your response…

    Thanks and Regards,
    Bhumika.

    • ChrisM says:

      Glad we got that all sorted, and look forward to more tasks, as and when more companies realise the importance of this sort of work.