Scenario: I get a call from a staff member, who I support. She wanted to see if she could obtain permission to some folders in a particular directory on my Windows 2003 file server. Without getting into the non-technical authorization of the situation and tossing the idea back and forth with my boss, I decided that we really needed was to get a listing of permissions of all the sub-folders in the directory in question.
I poked around the web a bit, until I discovered a Microsoft tool that helps to manage permissions using the command line. GUIs are great for one-off tasks, but command line is necessary handle these types of tasks. Here's the gist of how I ended up with the results I needed:
- Download Xcacls.vbs from the Microsoft link below. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825751
- Open a command prompt window.
- At the command prompt, navigate to the location where Xcacls.vbs is saved.
- Type in Xcacls.vbs \\server\share\folder\* > c:\output.txt
This got me the output I needed. I did need to clean up the the output a bit because there were some extraneous files in the directory that was not necessary to the task. I know this tool can go further than just listing permissions. When I need to modify permissions across multiple files/folders I will try this out.
