After WB update cacls.exe runs in cmd window

What the heck was that?

from WinCustomize Forums
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
2,974 views 11 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
ooh. I got one too. Did a search for it, found it in system32.

Working on what it does.
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I don't think it's (too) evil. Too much info for me to aborb: Link
Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
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.
Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I had this happen also.
First after updating WindowBlinds and again after Iconpackager update.
Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top

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.

Reply #6 from WinCustomize Forums Top
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.
Reply #7 from WinCustomize Forums Top
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.
Reply #8 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Happened to me on my XP rig with this rc update, too. Good to know it was *as designed*.

Cheers,
Daiwa
Reply #9 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Gads.. had me worried for a tad. Sorry if I set off any bad alarms with anyone.
Reply #10 from WinCustomize Forums Top
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.

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Reply #11 from WinCustomize Forums Top
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.