Excessive depth

Question

I'm evaluating Agent Ransack (2010 build 762) and so far it seems like a fine utility, but it has one quirk I don't see mentioned in the help or questions here (maybe because I don't know the terms).

When searching on the system drive (Win7 pro), it goes down a rabbit hole of \appdata\appdata\appdata\appdata for each profile. It will find the same files in each "path", until it (presumably) silently errors out at MAX_PATH and moves on.

Is there a global setting to get the software to ignore symlinks or whatever Windows calls these?

Answer 1

In FileLocator Pro you can solve this issue by checking the Exclude System Hidden junction points.

Agent Ransack, however, does not have this convenient user interface option (something that will be fixed soon). For now you can activate the option editing the config.xml file:

1. Go to Configuration->Folder Settings and look for Configuration files folder
2. Click the Open folder in Explorer button
3. Open the config.xml file in Notepad

4. Locate this line:

   </item><item name="ExcludeSystemHiddenJunctionPoints" tchar="0">AAAAAA==

5. And change it to this:

   </item><item name="ExcludeSystemHiddenJunctionPoints" tchar="0">AQAAAA==

That should switch off the symlink searching for system junction points. If you want to switch off all junction point searches change:

</item><item name="SearchJunctionPoints" tchar="0">AQAAAA==

to

</item><item name="SearchJunctionPoints" tchar="0">AAAAAA==

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More information:

With the introduction of Windows Vista Microsoft changed the default names and locations for system folders such as "Documents and Settings" and "Application Data". For compatibility reasons junction points (also known as system links) were added to redirect any file access using those old locations to the new locations, e.g. "Users", "Documents" etc.

By default the security settings on those folders deny List folder / read data permission. This prevents applications such as FileLocator Pro and Agent Ransack traversing those folders.

However, when changing the permissions for system folders it is very easy for this List folder / read data permission to be 'lost'. Without the restriction recursive folder traversal can occur.

Comments

I appreciate the response. I missed it because I apparently wasn't subscribed to this thread as I thought.

Unfortunately, when I examined the XML file that line was already in the state you showed:

</item><item name="ExcludeSystemHiddenJunctionPoints" tchar="0">AAAAAA==

I suppose I could switch it to the other state to see if it matters. Or just wait for the next version, if I don't find something that works already.

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I've modified the answer a little to show how to switch off all junction point (symlink) searches.

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Well, for whatever reason, your advice seems exactly backward. I changed the existing line from "AAAAAA==" to "AQAAAA==" and now it does not follow symlinks (or junction points). Losing junction points is a minor annoyance -- which maybe I can solve using the information in your revised posting.

So thanks for the pointer to the correct area, which I wouldn't have found otherwise.

But I think you should check the logic of your suggestion. Assuming "AA...." and its cousin are base64 values, AA evaluates to 0 (false) and AQ evaluates to 1 (true). So it follows that if you wanted to "ExcludeSystemHiddenJunctionPoints" then you would want the line to evaluate to True, as I have done. Make sense?

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You're absolutely correct, I had put the information the wrong way around. It's been fixed above. Thanks for letting me know.