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September 12, 2006
Does Anyone At Microsoft Actually Use Windows?
That's a rhetorical question, I know they do (in fact, I know from talking to recent escapees, that most of them are still using XP and avoiding Vista, but that's a different story).
I'm rebuilding Dawnise's computer, and step 1 was backing up her old drive onto a spare HD I have here for just such a purpose. I found a tool called XXClone, and to make a long story short, I ended up needing to run that tool as the SYSTEM account so it could copy all the files on her drive, even the ones that neither my account nor Administrator had rights to read.
I dunno if you've ever tried to get a CMD window running as SYSTEM, but it's non-trivial - nothing as simple as "su -" or "sudo bash" - I found a solution, but couldn't get their suggested command-line working, I just kept getting the sc usage summary.
It turned out that my mistake was assuming that option=value should be the same as option=[space]value. Apparently, if you're the idiot implementing command-line parsing for sc, they aren't.
It's not like it's hard. Sure, supporting option=value means you can't just loop through argv, but it's clearly the right thing to do.
Posted by dberger at September 12, 2006 2:28 PM
Comments
The trouble is - no one at Microsoft uses XP the way you are using it. They run Office and Media Player and the other Windows apps that support the proposed use cases. Running a CMD window as SYSTEM isn't in anyone's use case list. :)
I'm with you on the stupid painfulness of it, however.
Posted by: Scott Snyder at September 13, 2006 8:30 AM