Things that were once hard

I needed a quick utility to generate a script for setting the permissions on a massive (wide and deep) directory structure.  The analysis for this was not going well - I asked someone else to try it and they did not get the scope of the issue.  I needed to just get something running quickly so I wrote a quick .NET app to generate what I needed.  I was pleasantly surprised when went to actually grab the permissions for a given folder.

The last time I did something where I was scraping permissions off a folder I was in C++ and the Win32 API.  Yikes!  High impedence for something that I was just going to throw away.

The following is a snippet of code that wrote doing in .NET 4 (I don't think this code would be any different in .NET 2).

 class FolderPermissions  
 {  
   public string Name { get; set; }  
   public IEnumerable<Acl> Acls { get; set; }  
 }  
 class Acl  
 {  
   public string Name { get; set; }  
   public FileSystemRights Permission { get; set; }  
 }  
 private static FolderPermissions GetFolderPermissions(string pFolderName)  
 {  
   AuthorizationRuleCollection perms;  
   perms = SafeCallToGetAccessRules(pFolderName);  
   var retAcls = new FolderPermissions { Name = pFolderName };  
   var acls = new List<Acl>();  
   foreach (FileSystemAccessRule perm in perms)  
   {  
     if ( perm.AccessControlType == AccessControlType.Deny)  
       continue;  
     var acl = new Acl() {Permission = perm.FileSystemRights, Name = perm.IdentityReference.ToString()};  
     acls.Add(acl);  
   }  
   retAcls.Acls = acls.ToArray();  
   return retAcls;  
 }  

This snippet is where I am copying the permissions for a given folder into my own lightweight structure, so that I could do queries on the structure to help me create the script.

One thing in particular I remember about doing this in Win32 was once I got the SID for a particular identity, it was a pain to resolve that to a name.  Now it is just the IdentityReference.Value.

This is the type of value I like.  Now if I just had a scripting language to do this in so I did not have to compile it would be all set.  Of course there are bunch out there - just I am not as proficient in them as I am in C#.  Hmmm.