One of my programs stores some information in a .CONFIG file.
I want to change those information for my purposes, but after changing it with an editor, the software does not use this file. Therefore i think i need to keep the meta data of this file in order to be successful.
The evidence, that the software does not use this modified file:
After changing this file (located in program folder) and uninstalling the software, the modified .CONFIG file is not removed.
Maybe i have to say: The .config file is protected. If i want to change it, windows blocks with "access denied". So i have to save it somewhere else, remove the original and copy it to the folder (without success as i already said).
So how to keep those meta information? is there a software which allows to modify it but keeps those information?
Thanks in advance
Related
When you copy files using CopyFileExA function (see Windows API Reference: winbase.h) it has the ability to "fail" or not, if the destination file already exist, using (or clearing) the flag COPY_FILE_FAIL_IF_EXISTS. However, I can not find the way to overwrite files with attributes Read Only, Hidden or System.
I am working on a backup program with specific requirements which I can't find anywhere else.
I was thinking that before copying a file with one or more of those attributes set, perhaps I could clear those attributes on an existing file and then proceed to copy the file, knowing that my program will overwrite existing file with clear attributes.
Is that the best approach?
Another option would be just delete the old file before copying a new one. But I'm afraid that if I delete the old (backup) file and only then will try to copy the new one AND if the copy for some reason fails, then I will ended up without a backup file.
Or maybe there's a way of overwriting System/Hidden files that I'm not aware of.
What would be the best method of accomplishing this - copy and overwriting files with System/Hidden/ReadOnly attributes set?
I'm looking for a editor in windows that constantly saves file.
In linux I do
cat>somefile
and then just start typing. somefile gets filled up as I type.
Is there editor or similar thing in WIndows? Preferably a non-dos tool?
I use WebStorm from JetBrains, which saves constantly and unobtrusively.
I really love it. I use it as a text editor and for my web development.
http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/
(and no I don't work there).
Its possible to install some unix features to windows.
Have a look at this CoreUtils
The shareware text editor UltraEdit by default works with using a temporary file which means create a copy of the file to edit in directory %TEMP% and copy this temporary file on save back to original file. The usage of a temporary file makes it possible to use Undo and Redo.
But it is possible at Advanced - Configuration - File Handling - Temporary Files to disable the usage of a temporary file for all files or just for large files depending on a threshold value in KB. All edits made on a file opened without usage of a temporary file are permanent which means immediately done on storage media.
Another feature of UltraEdit is automatic save in regular intervals which can be configured at Advanced - Configuration - File Handling - Save with or without making a backup on every save and even supporting version backups which means backups with an incrementing number on every save.
Last but not least on usage of a temporary file for editing a file as by default UltraEdit can recover last edits if UltraEdit crashes (uedit32.exe process killed with Windows task manager), or Windows crashes, or a sudden power loss occurs. The temporary file is updated quite often in the background by UltraEdit and therefore the restore on next start after an unexpected end of the editing session often restores nearly all edits made last on a file. The recovery feature includes also new files not being saved ever as file with a file name.
It would be interesting to know for offering a perhaps better solution why you want that any edit is immediately written to the file. In general this is the opposite of what users want on editing a text file and is not good on some storage medias like SSD hard disks.
Our software automatically creates a directory in the users documents containing sample files, log files etc. However, we want to give the user the opportunity to change this directory (as I personally hate software that "forces" you to use their suggestion). The path to this directory is therefore not hardcoded but is part of a file containing user settings.
The obvious place to put the user settings file is in the above mentioned directory within the users documents. This of course creates a contradiction (the software wouldn't know where to look for the user settings as the path is in the user settings). We usually just put this settings file with the exe, so in most cases that would be in the Program Files. This however creates problems when the user has no admin rights because some of the settings can be changed from within the software and are then written to the file.
What is the most elegant way to solve this?
This is what the AppData folder is for
Microsoft Explanation
I need to be able edit the content of index.dat file programmatically (C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Cookies\index.dat). More precisely I need to modify it in order that index.dat for one user can be used for a different user name. Is there any documentation out there for this kind of binary file?
Pasco (http://www.foundstone.com/us/resources/proddesc/pasco.htm) is a free index.dat parser that comes with the source code.
Docs will be hard to come by - Microsoft has never publicly documented the structure of the the structure of this file. That said, you can find docs on the web such as the one mentioned above.
However, note that IE keeps close tabs on this file. The file is locked while IE is running (meaning, you can open/read it in some modes but not in others) and you can certainly not write to it.
One method that might still work is to boot-up in safe mode and then assign yourself administrator rights and then see if you can find the files to delete them.
The method I now use is to create a batch file to rename the subfolder below the folder containing the index.bat files and to then only copy the folders back to the original location that don't contain these files but the resultant batch files needs to be run from a separate windows account that has full administrator permissions.
The freeware code editor PSPad will allow you to view and to edit the contents of all of the index.dat files on your computer in hexadecimal form. This is done by replacing all of the digits in the first eight columns with zeros. This removes all of the information contained in the files.
It's a tedious process, requiring holding down the "0" (zero numeric key) as all of the edits are made, but anyone then accessing any of the index.dat files will get no information.
IE must be closed when doing this or you may receive an error message when attempting to save the modified file(s).
My windows co-workers were asking me if I could modify my non-windows binary files such that when their "Properties" are examined under Windows, they could see a "Version" tab like that which would show for a Visual Studio compiled exe.
Specifically, I have some gzipped binary files and was wondering if I could modify them to satisfy this demand. If there's a better way, that would be fine, too.
Is there a way I could make my binaries appear to be exe files?
I tried simply appending the VS_VERSION_INFO block from notepad.exe to the end of one of my binaries in the hope that Windows scans for the block, but it didn't work.
I tried editing the other information regarding Author, Subject, Revision, etc. That doesn't modify the file, it just creates another data fork(what's the windows term?) for the file in NTFS.
It is not supported by windows, since each file type has their own file format. But that doesn't mean you can't accomplish it. The resources stored inside dlls and exes are part of the file format.
Display to the user:
If you wanted this information to be displayed to the user, this would probably be best accomplished with using a property page shell extension. You would create a similar looking page, but it wouldn't be using the exact same page. There is a really good multi part tutorial on shell extensions, including property pages starting with that link.
Where to actually store the resource:
Instead of appending a block to the file, you could store the resource into a separate alternate data stream on the same file. This would leave the original file stream non corrupted on disk and not cause its primary file size to change.
Alternate data streams allow more than one data stream to be associated with a filename. Each stream is identified by a colon : at the end of the filename and an identifier.
You can create them for example by doing:
notepad test.txt:adsname1
notepad test.txt:adsname2
notepad test.txt
Getting the normal Win32 APIs working:
If you wanted the normal API to work, you'd have to intercept the Win32 APIs: LoadLibraryEx, FindResource, LoadResource and LockResource. This is probably not worth the trouble though since you are already creating your own property page.
Can't think of any way to do this short of a shell extension. The approach I've taken in the past is a separate "census" program that knows how to read version information from any kind of file.
Zip files can be converted into exe files by using a program that turns a zip file into a self-extracting zip (I know that WinZip does this, there are most likely free utilities for this also; here's one that came up on a search but I haven't actually tried it). Once you've got an exe, you should be able to use a tool like Resource Hacker to change the version information.
It won't work. Either Windows would have to know every file format or no file format would be disturbed if version information were appended to it.
No, resource section is only expected inside PE (portable executable; exe, dll, sys).
It is more then just putting the data inside the file, you have a table that points to the data in the file header.
What you can do if you have NTFS drive, is to use NTFS stream to store custom properties this way the contact of the binary file will remain the same, but you will need to use a custom shell extension to show the content of the stream.