Programs not inheriting the credentials of the owner

PraetorianGuard · 20 Oct 2009

Hey,

I tried running a program or bot on my Windows 7 Installation a few days ago. I assumed that the program would actually own the credentials of me since I was running it, but sadly that was not right as the program proceeded to tell me that it couldn't write to files. Which I found odd as I myself could both open then, read, add and then save with the changes remaining.

I had to actually add myself to the folder with "Full Control" before the program could run without any error. Now is it I ask, Why is that even required?. I thought it was implied that if I can access the folder, read and write to and from it, that any programs I run can do the same.

At least thats how it worked under XP, but yes I am aware that security has been tightened in both Vista and Windows 7. But seems rather useless having to assign myself to a folder I got access to already, before a program I run can access it.

johngalt · 20 Oct 2009

That would depend upon a couple of things:

The folder tree you were attempting to write to
The existence of the tree *prior* to your current Windows 7 install
What context the program was actually running under....

IOW - we need a bit more information. This type of thing can happen for different reasons, and it cannot be determined from the info we have why it was occurring....

PraetorianGuard · 21 Oct 2009

1: Not sure what you mean by this particular question

2: The folder existed prior to my Windows 7 installation as I was running the program perfect under Windows XP SP3

3: The "program" is a perl script aimed at running as a Game on an IRC server. Said "game" launches a Perl procecss, run by me as the user but could not write to the files where in it saved the game data. The only way I got it to work was to add myself as a Full Control to the folder. And I thought such access was "implied", since I could access, read and write to any files in that folder.