PowerShell Get-ACL available in Microsoft.PowerShell.Security module gets permissions on folders and subfolders. Windows OS stores information related to file, folder, and subfolders permission in Access Control List (ACL).
PowerShell provides a Get-ACL cmdlet that gets the access control list for the resource. The Access control list contains the users and users group permission to access the resource.
To get permissions on folder, use get-acl cmdlet
In this article, I will explain you how to get permissions on folders and subfolder and NTFS permission report as output file.
Get permissions on current working directory
To get NTFS permissions report on current working directory in PowerShell, use Get-ACL cmdlet without any parameters. It returns access control list for directory.
PS C:\Temp\>Get-ACL
In the above example, Get-ACL gets permissions on current working directory, here in C:\Temp.
Output of the Get-Acl gets permission on folder as below
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Get NTFS permissions report on folder in format-table
To get output of PowerShell get-acl cmdlet on folder permissions in format-table, use below command
PS C:\Temp> Get-Acl | Format-Table -Wrap
Above command, gets the NTFS permission report on folders and outputs results to Format-Table. Output of the above command as below
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Get permission on folders and subfolders recursively
Use below command to get permission on folders and subfolders using Get-ACL
PS C:\PowerShell\>Get-ChildItem -Recurse | where-object {($_.PsIsContainer)} | Get-ACL | Format-List
In the above PowerShell example, to get permissions on folders and subfolders recursively,
Get-ACL can’t return all folders and subfolders permission hence we need to use PowerShell Get-ChildItem cmdlet with -Recurse parameter.
Output of the the command pass through where-object{$_.PslsContainer} filter to select only folder. PsIsContainer get directory if its property in file system object set to true.
Later, using Get-ACL cmdlet gets permissions on folders and subfolders recursively.
Output of the above command list permissions on folder as given below
In case if you want to output folder permissions to a txt file, use below command
PS C:\Temp> Get-ChildItem -Recurse | where-object {($_.PsIsContainer)} | Get-ACL | Format-List | Out-File D:\folder-permission.txt
Above command, it get permission of folder and subfolders available in C:\Temp folder and gets permissions for that resource using Get-ACL and output results to D:\folder-permission.txt file.
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Conclusion
In the above blog post, I have shown you how to get NFTS permission report using PowerShell for folders and subfolders.
I hope you found above article on how to get permissions on folders and subfolders informative and educational.
You can find more topics about PowerShell Active Directory commands and PowerShell basics on ShellGeek home page.