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I have a portable version of WinSCP. After unzipping the archive and moving it to C:\Program Files (x86)\Dev\WinSCP it turns out that when I run the WinSCP.exe file, it does not have permissions to write to its WinSCP.ini file, that sits in the same folder as the application.

I can probably solve this temporarily by running WinSCP.exe as an Administrator, but this feels like the wrong approach in the long run.

Tom Auger
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    It's portable. There's no reason it needs to be in Program Files. Move it to its own folder somewhere outside of Program Files (like in the root). – joeqwerty Jan 15 '13 at 17:05

1 Answers1

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The Program Files folders are protected, meaning that only Administrators can change their contents for security reasons.

Typically the application does not write to the Windows registry or store its configuration files in the user's profile. Instead, it stores its configuration files in it's own directory.

The idea behind the portable apps platform is simply to run applications in a user's home directory.

Wikipedia: About Program Files

mate64
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  • Good stuff. So it looks like it's not a good practice to allow the application to write to the contents of the Program Files directory under any circumstance. Thanks. – Tom Auger Jan 15 '13 at 18:40