How to expand environment variables remotely with .NET?

Question

I need a way to expand environment variable on a remote machine.

Suppose I have a path to a folder %appdata%\MyApp\Plugins or %ProgramFiles%\MyCompany\MyApp\Plugins and I want to list files in that folder for audit purposes. The only problem is I want to do it on a remote machine, which however I have admin access to.

An extra question (but not essential) is how to do that for given user on remote machine?

Answer 1

You would use GetFolderPath. There are a bunch of different SpecialFolder values that you could use including ProgramFiles and ApplicationData

string path = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ProgramFiles);

Then you could just combine it with the rest of your path

string full_path = Path.Combine(path, "\MyApp\Plugins");

On a remote machine, it looks like you can try something like this

ConnectionOptions co = new ConnectionOptions();
// user with sufficient privileges to connect to the cimv2 namespace
co.Username = "administrator"; 
// his password
co.Password = "adminPwd";
ManagementScope scope = new ManagementScope(@"\\BOBSMachine\root\cimv2", co);
SelectQuery query = new SelectQuery("Select windowsdirectory from Win32_OperatingSystem");
ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher(scope, query);
foreach (ManagementObject windir in searcher.Get())
   Console.WriteLine("Value = {0}", windir["windowsdirectory"]);

Or for a list of all remote environment variables and their values, from here

public static void GetSysInfo(string domain, string machine, string username, string password)
{
    ManagementObjectSearcher query = null;
    ManagementObjectCollection queryCollection = null;

    ConnectionOptions opt = new ConnectionOptions(); 

    opt.Impersonation = ImpersonationLevel.Impersonate; 
    opt.EnablePrivileges = true; 
    opt.Username = username; 
    opt.Password = password; 
    try 
    { 
        ManagementPath p = new ManagementPath("\\\\" +machine+ "\\root\\cimv2");   

        ManagementScope msc = new ManagementScope(p, opt); 

        SelectQuery q= new SelectQuery("Win32_Environment");

        query = new ManagementObjectSearcher(msc, q, null); 
        queryCollection = query.Get(); 

        Console.WriteLine(queryCollection.Count);

        foreach (ManagementBaseObject envVar in queryCollection) 
        {
            Console.WriteLine("System environment variable {0} = {1}", 
            envVar["Name"], envVar["VariableValue"]);
        }
    } 
    catch(ManagementException e) 
    { 
        Console.WriteLine(e.Message); 
        Environment.Exit(1); 
    } 
    catch(System.UnauthorizedAccessException e) 
    { 
        Console.WriteLine(e.Message); 
        Environment.Exit(1); 
    } 
}

OP Edit: Also %AppData% can be found from registry (can be done remotely) at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders and Program Files at HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion, under ProgramfilesDir.