CAlternateDataStreams and lsads

About

CAlternateDataStreams is a C++ utility class without dependencies to the STL, MFC, ATL or some such. It allows you to list all the alternate data streams (ADS) on an NTFS file or folder.

lsads is a simple tool to enumerate the ADS from the command line.

Installation

No installation required. Download the binaries (32 and 64bit) from SourceForge. Use an archiver to unpack the archive, I recommend 7-Zip, and then place the .exe files into a folder listed in your PATH environment variable.

As for the utility class all you need is to place the files AlternateDataStreams.hpp and VerySimpleBuf.hpp into your project, #include the former and you should be set to use the CAlternateDataStreams C++ class.

Build instructions

If you prefer to use Visual Studio, a solution/project for Visual Studio 2005 is included and you can generate any of the other supported projects yourself using the premake4 that comes with the WinDirStat source code. Use a tool such as sigcheck to verify the code signature on it, though.

The way you generate the projects is by calling premake4 one of the following ways:

premake4 vs2005
premake4 vs2008
premake4 vs2010
premake4 vs2012
premake4 vs2013
premake4 vs2015
premake4 vs2017
premake4 vs2019
premake4 vs2022

The earlier Visual Studio versions may work, but no guarantees.

My prepared premake4.lua can take a number of arguments. Most notably it'll take

• --xp to generate XP-compatible projects on newer VS versions.
• --msvcrt to use the msvcrt.dll import Windows Vista WDK which makes the resulting binary statically import msvcrt.dll, but in the version backwards compatible until Windows 2000 (and 2003 for x64). In order to make use of this, you have to set the environment variable WLHBASE to point to your WDK (e.g. WLHBASE=C:\WINDDK\6001.18002).
• --release will generate the release solution (no Debug configuration) and is used by the relbuild.cmd script. This option implies --xp and --msvcrt at the time of this writing.

Requirements

The program should run on Windows 2000 and later for x86-32, and on Windows 2003 and later for x86-64, aka x64 (this includes Windows XP x64, which used the same code base as Windows 2003 Server). Itanium CPUs are not supported, but feel free to build that yourself, if needed.

The CAlternateDataStreams class should work starting on Windows 2000, too. If you happen to have some old NT4 box around, try it there. It's likely it will still work even there (except if your linker does funny things).

Usage

Syntax:

lsads [--nologo] <path>

License

The tool and the classes are placed into the PUBLIC DOMAIN/CC0, with the exception of CVersionInfo (inside VersionInfo.hpp), which is licensed under the very liberal MIT license. Licensing information can usually be found at the top of each source file. Anything not explicitly licensed in the source file can be assumed to have been placed into the PUBLIC DOMAIN/CC0.