I'd like to create a file with an invalid created/modified/accessed timestamp to use in unit tests to ensure that my application can handle files with invalid timestamps. It's a Windows application written in C# that could run on both NTFS and FAT32 filesystems.
This is not possible.
If you are looking for a timestamp editor, I found this one useful.
http://code.google.com/p/stexbar/
Have a look at the opensource 'Touch for Windows'.
It updates the dates associated with a file to whatever you want it to be. It can change access, modification and creation dates. You as a user can update them independently of each other, you can update them with any possible date. Dates can be now, user specified or copied from another file. If you try to touch a file which does not exist, this command will create it for you (empty of course).
Have a look and download the source here.
Get the NuGet package MySql.Data in version 8.0.18 ( from here).
On my NTFS filesystem, this little dll acts a bit weird.
Related
Starting from Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (version 16299.15) and OneDrive build 17.3.7064.1005 the On-Demand Files are available for users (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/learn-about-onedrive-files-on-demand-0e6860d3-d9f3-4971-b321-7092438fb38e)
Any OneDrive file now can have one of the following type: online-only, locally available, and always available.
Using WinAPI how can I know that the file (e.g. "C:\Users\Username\OneDrive\Getting started with OneDrive.pdf") is online-only file?
After years, I'm still using FILE_ATTRIBUTE_RECALL_ON_DATA_ACCESS attribute described here to determine if a file or a directory is completely present locally or not.
Microsoft docs says the following for FILE_ATTRIBUTE_RECALL_ON_DATA_ACCESS:
When this attribute is set, it means that the file or directory is not fully present locally. For a file that means that not all of its data is on local storage (e.g. it may be sparse with some data still in remote storage). For a directory it means that some of the directory contents are being virtualized from another location. Reading the file / enumerating the directory will be more expensive than normal, e.g. it will cause at least some of the file/directory content to be fetched from a remote store. Only kernel-mode callers can set this bit.
There are some advantages of FILE_ATTRIBUTE_RECALL_ON_DATA_ACCESS:
It can be used for both files and directories.
It can be set in kernel mode only, so there is no chance for anyone to set the attribute arbitrary.
And as it described in this answer, there are still some interesting undocumented attributes which can provide additional information about cloud files.
Note: I didn't accept Jonathan Potter's answer because I mentioned FILE_ATTRIBUTE_RECALL_ON_DATA_ACCESS attribute in comments and started using it a year earlier than he updated his answer.
To check for "online only" all you need is to call GetFileAttributes() and see if the FILE_ATTRIBUTE_OFFLINE attribute is set.
In fact this isn't new for OneDrive, that attribute has existed for a long time.
There are other OneDrive attributes available via the shell (although the property you need is PKEY_StorageProviderState rather than PKEY_FilePlaceholderStatus) but "online only" is easy to check for.
Edit: Another filesystem attribute, FILE_ATTRIBUTE_PINNED is new for Windows 10, and is used by OneDrive to indicate a file that's "always available".
Edit: As of 2019 it appears that OneDrive now uses FILE_ATTRIBUTE_RECALL_ON_DATA_ACCESS rather than FILE_ATTRIBUTE_OFFLINE, as suggested below.
Edit: PKEY_StorageProviderState was broken in Windows 10 1903, and still not fixed in 1909. It returns 4 ("uploading") for all files in any apps other than Explorer.
Take a look at the PKEY_FilePlaceholderStatus property for the file (at the shell level, not the file-system level). This blog post has a example program you can test. This question also hints to some undocumented properties you might want to take a look at.
Microsoft has a UWP example on MSDN.
What methods exist to include parameters (such as userid) into the setup.exe that users download from a server?
I'm looking for a way to give a customized installer to users that I already know (because they are logged in).
Is your question tied with some technology/installation system? Or you are researching which installation system to use to achieve this functionality?
In NSIS there is option to append custom data to installer, see this article: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/ReadCustomerData.
Maybe the easiest would be to send a setup_whateverparameter.exe filename instead of setup.exe...
A smarter approach would probably be to store parameter into a ressource file which would be edited from command line with some tool like http://www.reseditor.com/
Another one would be to generate a sort of INI file which would be packed with the original setup file using some installer software like Inno Setup (http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php) and the original installer would be configured to check if some ini file exists in a temporary location, to just use its content to do specific tasks.
Other possibilities might exists, thoses are just the one which might be the most easy to implement.
#elfrancesco hinted at Ninite and Patrick from Ninite got back to me with:
We put the installer id in a segment of the .exe that doesn't get
included in the hash for the signature. So we just sign our loader
.exe once whenever we update it and then our web server drops in the
key for each download.
I would like to generate some temporary files in the course of my application. Specifically, I'm using AVAudioRecorder to record a file that I, upon stopping the recording, would like to load and edit/process. My question is:
What is the appropriate standard place to create temporary files. Is there some generally accepted approach to this for Mac or for iPad programming in general? I don't want to simply create a directory and write files into it if there is a proper protocol to this.
The answer to this question is actually a lot more complicated then one might assume. One cannot necessarily just use NSTemporaryDirectory and be done. I cocoadev.com has some good pages on this topic and I would suggest that you study them yourself and determine what will work best for your circumstance.
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?NSTemporaryDirectory
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?GettingTemporaryFolderOnSpecificVolume
The usual place for applications to store temporary data is /var/tmp. You could also use /tmp but this directory is for system-generated temporary files and anything in /tmp is deleted when the machine reboots.
What I found was that according to the iOS Application Programming Guide, I am supposed to query for the appropriate temporary folder for my application via NSTemporaryDirectory(). I tried this and it returned a folder within the /var directory, in my case '/var/folders/pQ/pQ+ZqZCSHWSIHftcbIo57U+++TI/-Tmp-/'.
/tmp or /usr/tmp are the usual places to store temporary files in Unix (which Mac OS X and iOS are).
I need to be able to store configuration files on machines that gets disconnected by plugging off the electricity ;), I'm using basic WinApi to store configuration data (WriteFile), this works unless the machine is plugged off ;), sometimes file isn't saved at all.
I was thinking of 2 solutions:
1) Transactional NTFS API (eg. CreateFileTransacted() ), but this thing works only on Vista and NTFS has to be present and I can't use it in most cases
2) To create a backup copy of configuration file in %APPDATA% directory, say 20 backup copies and restore them on application startup when damaged configuration file is detected
If you know of any other solution to my problem (the main problem is turning off the machine by plugging it out), please let me know. Thank you.
You don't really need 20 backup copies. You only need 1 - the last copy. Now, if your client actually asks for a basic versioning system for config files that is another story. But just to have a good config file you only need 1 backup.
Now, here's what I used to do for my embedded projects:
Calculate a hash of the config file and store it in the file. The easiest is to append it to the end of file as a comment. I used to use crc32 for this but these days I would use SHA1. This can even be done automatically by a config-uploader tool just prior to transmitting/storing the config file.
When opening the config file, extract the hash and compare it with the value calculated from the file (obviously calculated after the hash is removed from the file). If the hash is not there then the file is incomplete. If the hash is not the same then the file is corrupted. In either case use the older file.
Now that a valid & correct config file is verified it can replace the older config file. Use the OS's rename operation for this. It is usually atomic on most modern filesystems so a failed rename will not clobber up the old file.
This is the most robust system I've used in my years of experience. It's basically what bittorrent does.
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.