MetaChat - Windows Vista UAC and command prompt questions.

MetaChat is an informal place for MeFites to touch base and post, discuss and chatter about topics that may not belong on MetaFilter. Questions? Check the FAQ. Please note: This is important.

13 November 2007

Windows Vista UAC and command prompt questions. Can any experts help?→[More:]I'm slowly transitioning to Vista, and I can get along with the occasional UAC prompt. However, I do a lot of my work from the command prompt, and find I need to have it set to "run as admin" to do the things I want to do. I don't have any real security concerns from the command prompt, since I'm using stuff I'm pretty familiar with. I've also done the same with my cygwin prompt.

Some questions:
1. Should I just turn off UAC entirely? I've read in some places that windows doesn't really handle this very well and other things can get messed up.

2. Is there any way to stop the UAC prompt every time I open a command prompt (run as administrator)? It does get annoying after a few times.

3. Running my command prompt as an administrator, my command prompt always starts in windows\system32, regardless of where the command prompt shortcut says to start it in. Is there a proper fix for this, short of just having it run a batch file at startup to put the prompt where I want it?

4. Perhaps unrelated, but, I like to use the "start" command from the prompt to run various programs. For example, the command "start x.txt" dutifully starts up notepad with x.txt. However, it doesn't work with me for .html files. It just says "access is denied". It does the same if I turn off UAC. The .html file association is fine, since I can open html files from explorer.

Other similar issues too, but too vague and unexamined as yet to post about.

Thanks for any help or commiseration you can offer. I'd post to this askme, but I'd have to hammer this rambling into a more coherent question, and I'm not sure I'm up to it.

post by: DarkForest at: 13:24 | 4 comments

Q1 - I disabled UAC without apparent reprocussions. I'm not one of the "wait for SP1" crowd, but seems like that feature needs to go back in the oven for a bit.

Q3 - I'm on an XP box now, but it worked when I checked it: Rather than a batch file, you can specify AutoRun commands in the Registry - "CD %Homedir%" into HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\AutoRun. XP dumps me into my homedir by default, so maybe getting %WINDIR% is a function of the "sandbox" virtualization that Vista does to protected processes. I dunno.

Q4 - Have you tried SlickRun? I quite like it.

Have you worked with PowerShell much at all yet? I've been trying to switch my head over, but it's been slow going; largely because PowerShell takes so long to get me to a shell prompt. ~12 seconds to useful on a Thinkpad T60, versus an eyeblink for cmd.exe

posted by Triode 13 November | 14:19

Thanks, Triode. I'll have to check out your registry autorun fix. I haven't quite understood what PowerShell is about. I mostly use the cmd.exe command prompt, and cygwin. I've got Launchy on my XP machine, but I've never really used it. Mostly, I've been able to get the command shell and batch files to do everything I need. Up till now, at least.

posted by DarkForest 13 November | 15:23

Mind that the AutoRun commands can be transiently disabled with the /D flag, should you ever need to.

PowerShell is the officially blessed replacement for CMD.exe, so it's coming at you sooner or later. It's built on .Net, and has a "verb subject" syntax because it's object oriented. I like what TechNet Magazine has been doing to introduce it.

Cygwin drives me crazy, because it's like using metric wrenches on SAE bolts. If I want Bash & good FOSS tools, I use Linux.

(begin rant) At my last gig, the Production Ops folks were trying to use DOS Batch scripts to automate scp file copies across CopSSH (which is OpenSSH running under an old fork of cygwin) in Production and wondering why it didn't work reliably. Um, could it be that with your chosen tool, NTFS acls and Cygwin/Posix acls like ships passing in the night? Or perhaps it's because you have at least 3 different versions of the cygwin dll scattered across yer servers, in two different path locations. Or perhaps it's bad acls on the SSH host keys (wait - which type of acl? both types have to be set from within their respective environments)

It's assuredly the "enterprise" choice to pay me a month's salary to fiddle with baling wire & bubblegum, rather than spend a one-time $250/server for a COTS windows-native implementation of SSHD. Or heck, do something really wild and use the IPSec built into the Windows server license that you've already paid for...

But hey, it's Production - your main revenue generator. It's not like its reliability is a competitive advantage for the entire company or anything.(/rant)

posted by Triode 13 November | 17:57

> Cygwin drives me crazy

I'm just the opposite. I find Cygwin a godsend, but Linux drives me crazy. I really want to love Linux, but I find the spotty hardware support and the clunky-seeming GUIs and desktops just too annoying (or maybe I'm just too old to climb the learning curve). Still there's some great stuff on Linux I want to try. Perhaps it's time to try Ubuntu again.

posted by DarkForest 14 November | 16:14

← Didn't || Thread in Which TPS or other In-The-Know Bunnies Explain the Stage Hand Strike →

HOME || REGISTER || LOGIN