After WB update cacls.exe runs in cmd window

What the heck was that?

Monday, June 6, 2005 by werewolf | Discussion: WinCustomize Talk

After I updated WindowBlinds, there was a cmd window in the background running a program called cacls.exe and it was running all the files in all the windowblinds folders. What was that and what was it doing?

Thanks,
ww
11 Reply 2 Referrals
Bichur
Reply #1 Monday, June 6, 2005 8:19 PM
ooh. I got one too. Did a search for it, found it in system32.

Working on what it does.

Bichur
Reply #2 Monday, June 6, 2005 8:26 PM
I don't think it's (too) evil. Too much info for me to aborb: Link

Phoon
Reply #3 Monday, June 6, 2005 10:02 PM
I would be VERY VERY concerned about calcs.exe running for no apparent reason. What it was doing was changing folder and file permissions. Sounds virus like to me.
It had nothing to do with updating windowblinds either. If that were the case you would have heard mass screams of hysteria erupting from the bowels of the ... (well, you know what I mean)

Unless per chance you have a slow system and were able to see something happening in the background. I've never seen it happen on its own though.

Jeff T
Reply #4 Monday, June 6, 2005 10:10 PM
I had this happen also.
First after updating WindowBlinds and again after Iconpackager update.

[email protected]
Reply #5 Monday, June 6, 2005 10:22 PM

It was setting the permissions on the WindowBlinds/IP folders so that Limited users would have access to them. I'll see what it was showing, it's fine. It's part of Windows.

It's technically been running on fresh installs for 6+ months, apparently I changed something and it's showing itself more.


werewolf
Reply #6 Monday, June 6, 2005 10:29 PM
Thanks for the heads up Nakor. I was a little concerned, but I trust you guys.

Btw, this wasn't a fresh install and it was running for a couple of minutes.

[email protected]
Reply #7 Monday, June 6, 2005 10:37 PM
I think it was recursing the skin dirs, which may or may not be necessary if the dir inherits the permissions. I'll look at it, I did change something there, but when testing on fresh installs with limited skins, didn't notice a problem. My bad.

Daiwa
Reply #8 Tuesday, June 7, 2005 12:18 AM
Happened to me on my XP rig with this rc update, too. Good to know it was *as designed*.

Cheers,
Daiwa

Phoon
Reply #9 Tuesday, June 7, 2005 8:24 AM
Gads.. had me worried for a tad. Sorry if I set off any bad alarms with anyone.

GhoS
Reply #10 Tuesday, June 7, 2005 8:47 AM
I was curious as well. It had never shown its face before when updating WB. You'd think they could have warned us or something. It is rare to see a command window show up on XP.

Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central

thomassen
Reply #11 Tuesday, June 7, 2005 7:46 PM
heh.. I think this startled quite a few people. When I updated IP and WB today I saw two of the cacls.exe windows appearing. I noticed alot of file and foldernames where flying down the list and that instantly alerted me thinking I was hit by some worm or virus. I was about to try to stop it when I noticed it was crawling my IP and WB directory. Thinking this was something related to the SD updated I let my guard down a little, but didn't feel completely safe so I quickly did a google for it and found that it's used to set permissions and attributes of files and it's shipped with Windows. This made me ease of and assume it was SD related. I'm glad now to get confirmation that it was and I wasn't the only one to see it.

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