How to manipulate files inside Inetpub/wwwroot all day without being bugged by UAC

Bertrand Le Roy — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:51:00 GMT

A lot has been written about UAC. Some choose to disable it. I chose not to and I'm doing just fine. At least, I don't have to type in my password on every prompt like on some other OS that likes to mock us on TV ;)

Anyway, the one place where UAC has been really annoying to me as a web developer is that any file manipulation in Inetpub requires validation by default (and that's legitimate, it's not a directory that you want rogue processes to be able to easily modify). I tend to be in that directory a lot.

So I was talking about that with Nikhil yesterday and we were wondering if running the Windows Explorer as administrator would fix the problem. At first, it looks like it doesn't, but Nikhil then mentioned that Explorer was probably not actually running as admin because all Explorer windows run under a single process by default. So I went to the folder options (press alt while in Explorer, choose tools/folder options) and activated "launch folder windows in a separate process" in the "view" tab. An Explorer launched as an administrator from this moment on will enable you to do all file manipulations without UAC prompts.

Hope this helps.

UPDATE: Dean suggested in the comments giving rights to your user acount on the directory. That works too, but it means that you're permanently disabling UAC on that directory for *all* applications that run under your identity. That may be fine depending on the value you attach to Inetpub contents. For example, don't do that on a production, public-facing machine (but the above method should probably not be used either in this situation). The method I expose above also exposes the system to shell extensions that you may have installed on the machine, so check those and only use trusted ones I suppose, or don't do this if unsure.

Tales from the Evil Empire : Vista

How to manipulate files inside Inetpub/wwwroot all day without being bugged by UAC