Solution to Simple File Sharing permissions headaches

[Lachoneus]

I often wind up with inaccessible files in shared folders on my
Windows XP Home machine. I've found that the cause of these problems
is that files that are moved into the share (as opposed to copied)
retain the permissions of their source folder and do not take on the
permissions of the share. Apparently this behavior is by design.

Mozilla is a big culprit; it downloads files to the temp directory and
then moves them to the download directory, so files downloaded by
Mozilla and saved in a network share are not accessible to other
systems on the network.

It's not hard to fix these permissions problems under Windows 2000 or
XP Pro using the Security tab of File Properties. In XP Home,
however, the Security tab has gone AWOL... unless you reboot into Safe
Mode, and I'm not interested in doing _that_ every time I have to fix
a permissions problem.

So I wrote a program that will fix a share's permissions from the
command line, no reboot required. Executable and source code
available here:

http://www.xmission.com/~jstanley/racls.html

Hopefully this will be of some help if there's anyone out there
besides me who, contrary to Microsoft's expectations, uses XP Home for
something other than Yahoo! chat.

 

[David Candy]

Home has a command line program built in. Cacls.exe. Hope this doesn't demotivate you.

 

[Lachoneus]

Home has a command line program built in. Cacls.exe. Hope this doesn't

demotivate you.

Cacls.exe lets you manually add or remove permissions for specific
users or groups, but it does not have the ability to reset files'
permissions and have them inherit their parent directory's
permissions. At least if it does, I was not able to figure out how to
do that.

My program, Racls.exe, will reset permissions for everything in a file
share in one fell swoop.