I have a REALLY strange thing happening! When I view a file (within the "Program Files (x86)" folder tree) in my file manager it has one content, but when I retrieve it through PHP CLI script using file_get_contents() it has different content (with some additional lines I added through the script earlier) - except if I run the CLI script in a prompt with admin rights, then I see the same content. How on earth is it possible that the same file can have different content based on the permissions of the user accessing the file? Is that really possible, and if so where can I find more information on how it works? I've never heard of such a thing in my 25+ years of computing and programming experience...
I have quatro-checked that the path is the same and checked in all kinds of ways that there isn't something else playing a trick on me - but I just can't find any possible explanations!
I'm running Windows 10.
32-bit applications that do not have a requestedExecutionLevel node in their manifest are assumed to be UAC-unaware and if they try to write to a privileged location in the file system or registry (when the process is not elevated) the write operation is virtualized. Virtualized files are stored in %LocalAppData%\VirtualStore.
Manually delete the file in the virtual store and then edit the ACL/security of the file if you need to write to it from your script as a standard user...