4sysops - FREE: AccessEnum – displays directory and registry permissions

AcessEnum from Microsoft’s Sysinternals tool collection enables you to list user accesses to a tree of directories or registry keys. With Windows Explorer or a registry editor you can only view access rights for a particular object, a certain folder, for example. If a directory has many subfolders it is difficult to figure out if access rights have been configured properly.

AccessEnum only lists the users and groups who have read or write access and where the deny attribute has been set. In most cases that should be enough though. What I like most about the tool is that it allows you to compare the current configuration with saved settings. This way you can easily find out if someone manipulated access permissions on a certain directory structure. If you right click on a column you can access the folder’s properties and you can also exclude a folder with its subfolders from the list.

The tool hasn’t been updated since November 2006, but it also works on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. AccessEnum is a stand-alone app which makes it a good candidate for the tool box on your memory stick.