Find out "Owner" of a file as displayed by Windows Explorer

I've seen some files on the FEX that allow you to get creation date / last modified date of a particular file

(See http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/24671)

but does anybody know how to get the name of the "Owner" of a file? (Which is another thing displayed by Windows Explorer so it has to be accessible somehow??)

[Jan]

Where do you see the owner in the Windows explorer? Do you mean: Context menu -> Properties -> Security -> Advanced -> Owner?

[Darin McCoy]

You can find details on how to show the Owner column here...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310297

[Jan]

Thanks, Darin! Now I understand where you find the owner.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Here's one way:

fileName = 'test.m';  % Some file you're interested in.
commandString = sprintf('dir %s /Q > owner_of_%s.txt', ...
  fileName, fileName);
system(commandString)
filebrowser; % Optional - Show current folder panel
% Now open the txt file you just created
% and parse it to find the owner.

Answer 2

[Jan]

You can use .NET:

finfo = System.IO.FileInfo(FileName);
dummyAccount = System.Security.Principal.NTAccount('dummy');
Owner = char(finfo.GetAccessControl.GetOwner(GetType(dummyAccount)).Value.ToString);

There must be a more direct method to get the NTAccount type instead of creating a dummy account.

The Windows API methods are not trivial and I hesitate to implement them in a function similar to GetFileTime.

[Darin McCoy]

not sure how to accept both your answers? but they both worked (so i accepted Image's and voted for yours??)....thanks for the help!

[Jan]

The .NET method includes the host name also, such that file owners of network drives are identified uniquely. The DIR approach does not handle this and demands for a complicated parsing of a text file.