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Sam
Asked: 2010-02-02 14:48:30 +0800 CST

How to compare directory/files and permissions on Windows?

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Is there a tool or command which will compare two directory trees on separate computers and output a list of differences, including differences in permissions?

I was looking at http://winmerge.org/ and it didn't seem to have this feature (it seems to compares file sizes and contents, but not attributes). Took a look through the options, but didn't see a setting to change this.

I've had some problems in the past with permissions getting messed up on some driver directories after an update and it would nice to compare a working installation with a broken one.

windows windows-server-2003

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Have you throught about using PowerShell to do this?

    PS2 includes a cmdlet Get-ACL which enums the NFTS permissions (including owner) for a given folder/file.

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  2. You can use ICACLs.exe, Included since Vista or so to dump the permissions to a text file. Then use WinDiff or Beyond Compare, or whatever your favorite file comparison tool is, to see the differences.

    Example icacls command line:

    icacls C:\Folder1 /T > Folder1.txt
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  3. Can't find anything that will perform a "diff" on file permissions in Windows, but I do know that RoboCopy and Richcopy (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.utilityspotlight.aspx?pr=blog) will copy files while preserving NTFS attributes like permissions.

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  4. I highly recommend setacl. It is a free tool you can obtain from helgeklein.com.

    To compare two directories I did this:

    • Make a list of all ACLs in both folders
    • List in a text format by: 
      setacl -ot file -on FolderA -actn list -lst "f:tab" > AclsFolderA.txt  
setacl -ot file -on FolderB -actn list -lst "f:tab" > AclsFolderB.txt
    • Compare the 2 lists. I do this with diff from CygWin: 
      diff AclsFolderA.txt AclsFolderB.txt

    I had a problem with comparing two user folders. These folders needed to have identical ACLs except for the user who owned the folder.
    I solved this by replace the username in the ACL with a common name customer. This allowed me to compare the ACL without having an obvious difference on the username itself.

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  5. Try dedicated tools

    Probably it worthwile to look at:

    Notes:

    • 1st one can scan folder tree & produce permission report which can be saved in Excel (having 2 reports you can do comparison in Excel),
    • 2nd can copy permissions...

    Unfortunately these 2 are not free, and not do exactly what you want but may be helpful for your task...

    AFAIK there are no off-the-shelf tool which can easily & conveniently do NTFS permissions comparison/copy, despite existing demand :)

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