Man this is annoying. A file tree ended up with a .svn folder which contains files marked read-only. When copied with Vista all is fine until you try to delete the folder, when you’re told “you need permission to perform this action” with “try again” and “cancel” with options, trying again many times didn’t do as much as I would have hoped. Eventually we found the files with the read-only attributes. These files are stored on a samba server so I suppose I’ll see if I can get get samba or a cron script to strip those attributes. Removing the read only attribute allows you to delete the file, but I can’t find any way to enable the old XP style dialog that tells you it is marked read only but allows you to delete it anyways if you have permissions. UAC is off, by the way.

update:

Raidiator, the debian based distro that runs on infrant (i always say infarant) / netgear readynas products has ‘store dos attributes = 1’ in the global section of /etc/samba/smb.conf. This stores the read-only / hidden / archive / system attributes in an extended attribute called user.DOSATTRIB:

getfattr -d entries
# file: entries
user.DOSATTRIB=”0x21″

Normally this is off and newer versions of samba use ‘map read only’ to determine what read only should be set to, based on the user write bit (default) (yes), the effective permissions of the user (permissions), or ignoring permissions and only using ‘store dos attributes’ (no).

I put ‘store dos attributes = 0’ in the share definition to override the global (/etc/frontview/samba/Shares.conf in raidiator) and reloaded samba (/etc/init.d/samba reload) and then the files properties showed that the file was not read only any longer, thus working around the problem of Vista not letting me delete read-only files.