Microsoft KB Archive/163911

= Cacls.exe May Not Redirect Output to a File =

Article ID: 163911

Article Last Modified on 11/1/2006

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0 Developer Edition
 * Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Standard Edition

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This article was previously published under Q163911



SYMPTOMS
When you use the Windows NT Cacls.exe command to redirect access control list information to a file instead of the screen, you may get unexpected results depending on the version of Cacls.exe that you are using.



MORE INFORMATION
Cacls.exe is a command-line utility that ships with all versions of Windows NT. It can display, replace, or edit, existing Access Control Lists (ACL) for files and directories on an NTFS volume. Cacls.exe is useful for resource administration and can also be helpful for troubleshooting issues related to permissions.

You can use Cacls.exe with the /t and /c switches to display ACL information.

For example, if you have a directory called c:\temp and you wanted to display the ACL for this directory, subdirectories, and its files, you could issue these commands:

'''cacls c:\temp /t /c

cacls c:\temp /t /c |more'''

You can also output the result to a text file with this command:

cacls c:\temp /t /c > 

The expected behavior is that the information would be written to a file rather than to the screen. However, under Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 2, the file is created, but contains only blank lines. Redirecting using the pipe (|) symbol opens Notepad with the appropriate filename, but again the file itself is empty.



RESOLUTION
To resolve this problem, use the original version of Cacls.exe from Windows NT 4.0.



STATUS
Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Windows NT version 4.0 Service Pack 2.

Additional query words: text file

Keywords: kbbug kbnetwork KB163911

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