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Monday 1 March 2010

Using XCacls on Server 2008

Ever needed to change permissions on files and/or folders in bulk? But you don't want to sit there watching it and hitting continue every so often.

Well XCacls will do the job. It is a control list tool that will set permissions at file and folder level in bulk, and will even set the inheritence.

XCacls is a fairly old tool and can be downloaded from here.

To use this on Server 2008, you will need to do two things.

First after downloading and extracting the XCacls.vbs file, you will need to edit it.


  • Open it in notepad and search for the "IsOsSupported()" Function. here you will need to add the version (6.0) to the list.

  • The next thing you will have to do is run the XCacls command as a "CScript." This is nice and simple just add "cscript" to the beginning of the command line.
For example: cscript xcacls.vbs Drive letter:\folder\* /S /T /i ENABLE /E /G DOMAIN\Account:F

A full list of Attributes and switches for XCacls can be found at the links below.

NOTE: If all you want to do is ADD permissions DO NOT forget the /E switch. This is important or you could find that your folders no longer have permissions.

Further information can be found here:

Microsoft Support Site
Tech Galaxy

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Actually, XCacls is not supported on microsoft OS's after windows 2003. You should be using ICacls.

Under the summary section of this article it states the following:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-za/kb/825751
"Note Xcacls.vbs is only compatible with Microsoft Windows 2000, with Microsoft Windows XP, and with Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Xcacls.vbs is not supported by Microsoft."

Please rather use this: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753525(v=ws.11).aspx

ICacls comes packages with windows 2008 and above.

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