Using winAPI to open mspaint [duplicate] - c++

Question

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I need to open an image with Microsoft Paint
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Open image with create process and ms paint
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Closed 11 months ago.
So I'm trying to open mspaint using winAPI. For some reason, the window doesn't shown and I don't know why. Here is my code:
#include <Windows.h>
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
STARTUPINFOA si;
PROCESS_INFORMATION pi;
ZeroMemory(&si, sizeof(si));
si.cb = sizeof(si);
ZeroMemory(&pi, sizeof(pi));
si.dwFlags = STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW;
si.wShowWindow = true;
CreateProcessA("mspaint.exe", (LPSTR)"mspaint.exe", NULL, NULL, FALSE, 0, NULL, NULL, &si, &pi);
WaitForSingleObject(pi.hProcess, INFINITE);
CloseHandle(pi.hThread);
CloseHandle(pi.hProcess);
return 0;
}
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Apart from the lack of error checking in your code (and the illegal cast), if you refer to the documentation, you will see that:
The function will not use the search path.
So, unless mspaint.exe happens to reside in the current directory (which is most unlikely) then CreateProcess won't find it.
The best solution is to use ShellExecute, something along these lines (error checking omitted for brevity):
HINSTANCE hInstance = ShellExecuteA (NULL, "open", "mspaint.exe", NULL, NULL, SW_SHOWNORMAL);
Like CreateProcess, ShellExecute doesn't wait for the launched process to complete before returning. If you want to do that, you can use ShellExecuteEx passing the SEE_MASK_NOCLOSEPROCESS flag and then wait on the process handle returned before finally closing it (in the same way you are doing now).