Show contents of windows\assembly folder or similar

In case you just want to view the original content of the windows assembly folder, or other system folders, you can do the following:

1. In console, type cd /d %windows%\assembly
2. Type: attrib -r -h -s desktop.ini
3. Type: ren desktop.ini desktop.bak

Reload the explorer window to see the actual contents...

If you want to restore the original view, just rename the desktop.bak back to ini.

This works also for other system folders, e.g. fonts folder.

In case you want two seperate views at the same time, you can do:


cd /d %windir%\assembly
attrib -r -h -s desktop.ini
mkdir gacview
move desktop.ini gacview
attrib +s gacview
attrib +r +h +s gacview/desktop.ini

The content of this post has be inspired by a MSDN blogs post!
Thx to Shahar Prish and Matthew Mastracci.