Why does FIND on Windows 7 give an “Access Denied” error?

Question

I have an administrator account on a Windows 7 x64 machine. It is not THE administrator account, the account is simply a member of the administrators group.

The install is default. When the user opens a command prompt it ends up in the users' %HOMEPATH% directory where you'll find various directories like the Documents folder. If the user uses the following (windows) FIND command, an "Access Denied" error occurs:

FIND /I "My String" C:\Users\Rann\Documents
Access denied - C:\USERS\RANN\DOCUMENTS

Using runas or right-clicking on the command prompt to run it as an administrator does not change this behaviour; an administrator-level cmd.exe still gives me the same error. Changing the path to any other directory gives the same error.

My question is thus: How is one supposed to use the FIND (and possibly other) commands? What rights are needed?

Answer 1

You are trying to execute find on a directory. It only works on files. Try this:

FIND /I "My String" C:\Users\Rann\Documents\*