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managing file permissions under windows (madness?)

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urlwolf:
I have to admit I ran XP with admin privs all the time. So I never had to worry about permissions.
However, I want to now separate admin and non-admin user.

It's proven to be a real pain, moreso compared to how unix-like OSs do it.
Pain points:

* Explorer (or TC) do not list file permissions. (!), at least that I could find. What's wrong with listing say -rwx------ like in unix? I really need a fast and visual way of looking at permissions. Quesion: do you know any software that displays permissions graphically?
* Changing permissions recursively sucks. You have to use cacls.exe, which is very limited. THere's setACL.exe, but it is also really ugly compared to chmod and chown. Question: how do you do this? Any tools? Having to right-click > properties > security is very long, and it's not recursive (!)
* Changing permissions is extremely slow. In unix, it rarely takes seconds, even for a huge tree. In windows, it's been minutes already for a not-so-big tree! Any reason for this madness?
* You are allowed to do crazy things like erradicate the administrators group. You read that right: you can make it so some user has full permissions on a file, but the admins don't. I have no idea how I managed to do this feat... and I fixed it now. But I'm really curious about what purpose this may fulfill
Not to mention that every action that requires admin privs will prompt for a passwd. So, in a normal day, you can easily type the admin passwd about seven billion orders of magnitude more than on unix.

All in alll... (quoting the penguins in "Madagascar" after arriving to antartica with a stolen transatlantic ship).
"Well... this sucks".

It makes me think I'm missing the proper tools.

It also makes me thing that when mom and pop have to deal with this, they will go crazy.
Is this the end of civilization as we know it?

lanux128:
i had some success with this tool, when i was stuck with WinXP Home, might be useful in your case too..

• FaJo XP FSE

Grorgy:
In TC (im using the ultima prime version) when the full details list is displayed the attributes show up.  To change the attributes, under the file menu the first option is change attributes.

urlwolf:
I see only very minimal info in TC (like -a--).
What does it mean?

Also, I changed the admin password, only to realize that now it doesn't let me use it.
Maybe typo? Maybe the new one it's too short?
I'm disgusted at having to reinstall the entire thing, or have to use a pwd recov. tool on this computer.
It may take ages.

I have no idea how it happened. How could I mistype the pwd twice?
I'm dissapointed enough to try Ubuntu 9.04 :)

Shades:
a - archive
r - read only
h - hidden

These will be the ones you see mostly anyway (when using Windows).

When you have physical access to a Windows PC, you can boot from a CD, USB stick or floppy disk with the following tool:
Offline NT Password & Registry Editor
It comes with instructions on how to use it, which is quite easy and should not take too much time...15 minutes in total or so ( including downloading, reading the instructions, burning the iso to a CD, booting from the CD, changing the password and rebooting normally).

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