This blog post explains there exist three known arguments: -k
to run a group of services, -s
to only run a specific service from the specified group, and -p
to turn on process mitigation policies.
Another blog post, provides more details on what -p
does. Windows has an API SetProcessMitigationPolicy
which a process can use to enable various mitigations against security vulnerabilities. Each possible type of mitigation is known as a "policy". In the Windows registry, under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Svchost
, there are three values which can be created to toggle three particular policies for svchost.exe
: DynamicCodePolicy
, BinarySignaturePolicy
and ExtensionPolicy
.
What the -p
option does, is force those three security mitigation policies to be turned on for this svchost.exe
process, even if they are not enabled in the registry.
Why does this option exist? Well, the ideal from a security viewpoint would be to toggle all three policies on in the Windows registry, so they are on all the time. However, it is possible that there is some product out there (whether Microsoft or third-party) which contains a service running in svchost.exe
and which breaks with these flags being turned on, hence Microsoft doesn't want to turn them on by default. However, for services shipped with Windows, where Microsoft knows they work fine with these flags turned on, there would be better security by having these flags turned on for those particular services. Hence -p
can turn those flags on for a particular group of services without turning them on for all svchost.exe
services.
Of course these are undocumented internals of Windows, and there is always the chance that Microsoft might break them in some future version. One should be aware of that possibility before trying to rely on them for anything.
Best Answer
So, the word around the Internet is that the
dropbox.py
command-line client does not work with the Windows or OS X versions of the Dropbox client. I can attest to this fact (for OS X, at least), having labored in vain to get Dropbox synchronizing to an OS X Server shell account at my university. Dig as deep as you like inside the app bundle, you won't find a headless daemon that you can run standalone without the GUI like you can on Linux. The Dropbox daemon is inseparable from the GUI on OS X.There used to be a Votebox ballot for this feature, but since Votebox has been disabled, the best you can do is go to this topic in the forums and pine away for this feature in desperation with all of the other users there. Unfortunately, to make matters worse, the Mac Dropbox client is also not AppleScriptable either, as noted here.
You may find this project interesting, though. Although it's not very Dropboxy in that it doesn't do two-way, automatic background synchronization, it can be run without installation on any *nix system with
curl
available (which, technically, includes a properly-equipped Cygwin installation on Windows). It might be sufficient for copying a few boilerplate config files down from your Dropbox account, or updating a file or two after you've modified them locally, but at that point, you're almost better learning to use Git.Source: http://techblog.willshouse.com/2011/04/09/dropbox-command-line-interface-cli/
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