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Asked: 2026-05-11T05:02:40+00:00

I have a C# application that scans a directory and gathers some information. I

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I have a C# application that scans a directory and gathers some information. I would like to display the account name for each file. I can do this on the local system by getting the SID for the FileInfo object, and then doing:

string GetNameFromSID( SecurityIdentifier sid ) {     NTAccount ntAccount = (NTAccount)sid.Translate( typeof( NTAccount ) );     return ntAccount.ToString(); }

However, this does not work for files on a network, presumably because the Translate() function only works with local user accounts. I thought maybe I could do an LDAP lookup on the SID, so I tried the following:

string GetNameFromSID( SecurityIdentifier sid ) {     string str = "LDAP://<SID=" + sid.Value + ">";     DirectoryEntry dirEntry = new DirectoryEntry( str );     return dirEntry.Name; }

This seems like it will work, in that the access to "dirEntry.Name" hangs for a few seconds, as if it is going off and querying the network, but then it throws a System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException

Does anyone know how I can get the account name of an arbitrary file or SID? I don’t know much about networking or LDAP or anything. There’s a class called DirectorySearcher that maybe I’m supposed to use, but it wants a domain name, and I don’t know how to get that either – all I have is the path to the directory I’m scanning.

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  1. The SecurityReference object’s Translate method does work on non-local SIDs but only for domain accounts. For accounts local to another machine or in a non-domain setup you would need to PInvoke the function LookupAccountSid specifying the specific machine name on which the look up needs to be performed.

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