AutoHotkey Community

[Martin]

How can I use AHK to view and edit file comments that are displayed in the Window file properties dialogue box?

I use Windows fax and I want to set the comment to "Printed dd/mm/yy" when I have printed a file.

Many thanks,
Martin

[BoBo]

Yes. I would be interested in getting a file properties read/write option as well.

[Tekl]

Hi,

the comments are only available at NTFS and are stored in the ADS. You can access these data-streams by FILENAME.EXT:streamname. To access the comment-stream try this: FILENAME.EXT:SummaryInformation
The Box is ASCII 005. Because the Informations are binary it's not possible to have access to them within AutoHotkey by FileRead.

Tekl

[Chris]

Thanks for the info.

This feature was previously requested and is on the to-do list as "New command FileGet/Set or FileGetProperties to retrieve and set things from a file's property sheet (title, author, permissions, etc.)" See also: http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1229

If anyone knows the basics of how to implement this, please let me know since I haven't researched it yet.

Related info from the past:

[Martin]

[Tekl]

Hi Martin,

remember, in front of SummaryInformation there must be the ASCII-Char 005. Without this Char you'll access a different in most cases non existent Stream. But even then you'll have no success because AHK stops reading the stream if the first zero-byte (ASC 000) occurs, so you won't see anything.

BTW, you can create your own Streams by:

Notepad F:\Temp\Temp2.txt:NewStream.txt

and with this code you have Access (your code was wrong):

[BoBo²]

Anyone has provided/found a solution already eg. with a DllCall() ?

[Lexikos]

FileRead is capable of reading binary data from files, as it reads the entire file at once. It should work just as well with alternate streams.