How to get Windows file details?

Question

I want to get the \"File description\" and the \"Copyright\" of exe/dll/sys files, as showed in the \"Details\" tab when you right click the file and choose the properties.

Answer 1

Not a definitive answer but here is an explanation of what you can try.

Note that this requires that you use JDK 7+.

Attributes defined by the JDK as standard (DosFileAttributeView, PosixFileAttributeView, AclFileAttributeView) don't account for user-defined metadata.

What you want is try and see whether your filesystem has support for UserDefinedFileAttributeView. If you have some luck, it will; if you have even more luck, you will have your attributes defined in there.

Here is a small example on my system (Ubuntu 14.04; filesystem is btrfs). I typed this line on the shell:

setfattr -n user.comment -v "home sweet home" $HOME

You can then read this using (note: Java 8 code):

public final class Attr
{
    public static void main(final String... args)
        throws IOException
    {
        final Path home = Paths.get(System.getProperty("user.home"));
        final UserDefinedFileAttributeView view = Files.getFileAttributeView(
            home, UserDefinedFileAttributeView.class);

        if (view != null)
            view.list().forEach(name -> readAttr(view, name));
    }

    private static void readAttr(final UserDefinedFileAttributeView view,
        final String name)
    {
        final ByteBuffer buf = ByteBuffer.allocate(1024);
        final CharsetDecoder decoder = StandardCharsets.UTF_8.newDecoder();
        try {
            view.read(name, buf);
            buf.flip();
            System.out.println(name + ": " + decoder.decode(buf).toString());
        } catch (IOException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException("exceptions in lambdas suck", e);
        }
    }
}

This prints:

comment: home sweet home

As the javadoc says, this is HIGHLY system dependent. Note that the only method to read an attribute by name is to read it into a ByteBuffer (nothing requires that an extended file attribute be text).