The Windows 7 Chronicles: GNU Patch, mt.exe, and the horror of UAC

Real quick one here. patch is a nice little command-line utility. GNU provides a fine version, and there's a Windows build available through the GnuWin32 project. When you try to run it on Windows 7 you get UAC prompts. Why? It turns out that Windows guesses, based on the name of the program, that it's going to patch application files, and goes ahead and requests elevated permissions for it that it doesn't really need. This was discovered a long time ago and a bug was filed against GnuWin, because it's clearly their responsibility to code around Microsoft's incredibly stupid heuristics*.

*in·cred·i·bly stu·pid heu·ris·tics, n: Heuristics that happen to be wrong in my case.

The bug report lists a manifest that you can embed into patch.exe to fix the problem. It looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">
<trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
<security>
<requestedPrivileges>
<requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false"/>
</requestedPrivileges>
</security>
</trustInfo>
</assembly>

Embedding it took me a while, but it's ultimately not that hard. First copy the manifest into a file somewhere. You have to use a tool called mt.exe, which is part of the Windows SDK. It's probably not in your path, but it's in the path of a Visual Studio Command Prompt. So open up one of those with admin permissions (under Win7: Start->All Programs->Microsoft Visual C++ 200x->Visual Studio Tools; right-click on Visual Studio 200x Command Prompt, select Run as administrator...). Then cd '\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin' (or wherever you've installed it) and mt -manifest yourfile -outputresource:patch.exe;1. Why ;1 at the end? Because Microsoft says so.