analyzing author metadata from all files in a main folder

General
1

I wrote a script that analyses the metadata from all files in a (nested) main folder. It returnes a dataframe with the columns "full_path", "file_size", "production_date" and "author".

However the author is only returned correctly when I run the script over a folder on my local drive. As soon as I run it over a folder on my companies server (to which I have reading and writing acces), I get some kind of coded author returned. When manually inspecting the metadata of any of such files, I see the actual author (myself or my colleagues).

The returned author from a folder on the server drive looks like this: O:S-1-5-21-3331848083-1022324987-3899522693-3353 (example).

Any idea's how to get the correct author returned from folders on a server drive?

Below is my code:

# Load necessary libraries
library(tidyverse)
library(lubridate)

# Function to get the file author (Windows)
get_file_author <- function(file_path) {
  if (!file.exists(file_path)) {
    return(NA)
  }
  
  # Normalize path to avoid issues with backslashes
  file_path <- normalizePath(file_path, winslash = "\\")
  
  # PowerShell command to retrieve only the resolved NTAccount name
  cmd <- sprintf(
    'powershell -Command "& {
        $acl = Get-Acl \'%s\'
        $owner = $acl.Owner
        Try {
            $sid = New-Object System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier($owner)
            $ntAccount = $sid.Translate([System.Security.Principal.NTAccount]).Value
        } Catch {
            $ntAccount = $owner  # Use the original value if translation fails
        }
        Write-Output $ntAccount
    }"',
    file_path
  )
  
  # Run the command and capture the output
  author <- tryCatch(system(cmd, intern = TRUE), error = function(e) NA)
  
  # Ensure we return a single cleaned-up author name
  return(trimws(author))
}



# Function to extract metadata from a file
extract_metadata <- function(file_path) {
  # Get file info
  file_info <- file.info(file_path)
  
  # Construct metadata list
  metadata <- list(
    full_path = file_path,
    file_size = file_info$size,
    production_date = as.character(file_info$ctime),
    author = get_file_author(file_path)  # Use the function to get the author
  )
  
  return(metadata)
}

# Function to process all files in a folder and its subfolders
process_files_in_folder <- function(main_folder) {
  # List all files in the folder and subfolders
  all_files <- list.files(main_folder, recursive = TRUE, full.names = TRUE)
  
  # Extract metadata for each file
  metadata_list <- lapply(all_files, extract_metadata)
  
  # Convert list to dataframe
  results <- bind_rows(metadata_list)
  
  return(results)
}

# Set the main folder path (change this to your actual folder path)
main_folder <- "path/to/my/folder"

# Process all files in the folder and its subfolders
file_metadata <- process_files_in_folder(main_folder)

# Print the resulting data frame
print(file_metadata)
2

Unless I'm misunderstanding, it seems like all the magic is happening in that powershell script. So this is not really a R question and you might get more answers on a Windows/Powershell forum.

That is, unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean:

What metadata? Is (example) an author name? If there is some kind of text with the author name, it might be possible to extract it on the R side, but it's not really clear to me what your Powershell call is returning.