First of all, I've been on a bit of a command-line kick recently. In other words, I'd rather take a few minutes to write a quick CMD (aka BAT) script than VBS. I'm having fun discovering the power of the Windows command line.

So today I needed to dump to file NTFS permissions for all folders on a large drive. (When trying just a simple cacls /t /c *.* > cacls.txt the command was failing on one file deep in the folder structure.) So I'm going to assume that the files inherit the permissions of the parent folder and just dump the folder ACLs (this is only a precaution for a hardware change this weekend).

So I wanted to try and dump the ACLs for all folders by using the command line. I tried a few options, did some research, and eventually came up with the following single-line command:

D:\>FOR /R %A IN (.) DO cacls "%A" >> cacls.txt

FOR /R recursively loops through the directory tree, so it actually causes the following sort of command to be repeatedly run:

D:\>cacls D:\directory1\. >> cacls.txt
D:\>cacls D:\directory1\directory1\. >> cacls.txt
D:\>cacls D:\directory1\directory2\. >> cacls.txt
...

Which then yields the following sort of output in cacls.txt:

D:\Directory1 BUILTIN\Administrators:(OI)(NP)F 
              BUILTIN\Administrators:(OI)(CI)F 
              DOMAIN\Domain Users:(OI)(CI)C 

D:\Directory1\Directory1 BUILTIN\Administrators:(OI)(CI)F 
                         DOMAIN\Accounting:(OI)(CI)C 
                         DOMAIN\Executives:(OI)(CI)C 

D:\Directory1\Directory2 BUILTIN\Administrators:(OI)(CI)F 
                         DOMAIN\Accounting:(OI)(CI)C 
                         DOMAIN\Executives_C:(OI)(CI)C 

There's probably an easier way to do this (come on, Patrick, I know you want to comment!), but it was quick enough for me to come up with this and it produced the output I wanted.