Just Let It Flow

Linux people who have to work in Windows are often talking about the basic tools it has which are absent from Microsoft’s product. While recent developments of Windows are slowly catching up with variously featured versions of whoami, ln, cat, grep, ps and chmod, one app that’s so far evaded the conversion is chroot. Whatever the reason may be for its absence, it is definitely not because there’s is no support mechanism for it.

It doesn’t sound like it should be so hard. I mean, the shell has managed to produce it every time you’ve logged on since Windows XP. MSDN even has a page dedicated to user profiles that includes a section on where it is and how its treated. It details that the users picture lives in their temp directory, except for most times when it doesn’t. The picture will turn up if you open the User Account control panel, but if you’re trying to grab it programatically, asking the user to open Control Panel and all that or even worse, opening it from your own code and killing the window just as quick aren’t fantastic solutions.