Add group “Everyone” to directory and all of it's sub-directories

Question

I'm currently using Vista 32-bit. How do I add the Windows security group "Everyone" and give full control to a directory and all of it's sub-directories and all files? Is there a powershell script that I could use?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I've expanded on martona's snippet and was able to give access to all folders and sub-folders. Here's my code -

$FilesAndFolders = gci "c:\data" -recurse | % {$_.FullName}
foreach($FileAndFolder in $FilesAndFolders)
{
    #using get-item instead because some of the folders have '[' or ']' character and Powershell throws exception trying to do a get-acl or set-acl on them.
    $item = gi -literalpath $FileAndFolder 
    $acl = $item.GetAccessControl() 
    $permission = "Everyone","FullControl","Allow"
    $rule = New-Object System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule $permission
    $acl.SetAccessRule($rule)
    $item.SetAccessControl($acl)
}

Answer 2

$acl = Get-Acl c:\mydir
$permission = "Everyone","FullControl","Allow"
$rule = New-Object System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule $permission
$acl.SetAccessRule($rule)
$acl | Set-Acl c:\mydir

Answer 3

Sometimes the "native" PowerShell way isn't necessarily the best way. For something like this I would still use icacls.exe. Remember that good ol' exes work pretty good in PowerShell. Just cd to the directory you want to set and execute:

icacls $pwd /grant "Everyone":(OI)(CI)F

This will give Everyone full access to the current directory downwards (via permission inheritance). This should work as long as there are no explicit denials to Everyone in the dir structure.