Thread: replacing system with CreateProcess

I have some code that starts up an executable with system(). It works fine except that it shows up a command prompt for a little while.

We want to get rid of that, so I changed the code to use CreateProcess. Now no window shows up but the program crashes. Anyone know what Im doing wrong?

Code:

int doCmdLineCall(std::string command) const
{
    //return system(command.c_str());
    // mimic return value of system() to not change error handling behaviour
    STARTUPINFO info = {0};
    PROCESS_INFORMATION procInfo = {0};
        
    BOOL ret = FALSE;

    std::string::size_type i = command.find_first_of(' ');
    std::string cmd;
    std::string param;

    if (i != std::string::npos)
    {
        cmd = command.substr(0, i);

        i++;

        param = command.substr(i, command.length());
      
        info.cb = sizeof(info);
        info.dwFlags = STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW;
        info.wShowWindow = SW_HIDE;

        ret = CreateProcessA(cmd.c_str(), (char *)param.c_str(), NULL, NULL, FALSE, CREATE_NO_WINDOW, NULL, NULL, &info, &procInfo);

        if (ret)
        {
            WaitForSingleObject(procInfo.hProcess, (DWORD)-1L);

            DWORD exitcode;
            
            GetExitCodeProcess(procInfo.hProcess, &exitcode);

            ret = (intptr_t)(int)exitcode;

            CloseHandle(procInfo.hProcess);
            CloseHandle(procInfo.hThread);
        }
    }

    return 0;// system(command.c_str());
}

Crashes where? On what line? With what error? Have you single-stepped it with a debugger? Does it get to execute the CreateProcessA function at all or does it crash while evaluating the param.c_str() parameter? If it executes, what return value do you get? Either that function should return an error, or it should execute the program. A crash tends to suggest that you just aren't sending it the correct parameters at all or you have other problems like NULL dereferences etc.

But without an error message or at least a line number that it crashes on, it's hard to help.

I guess the called program is expecting argc to be at least 2 and argv[1] to be non-null, the code you have only create an argc of 1 and hence, a NULL argv[1]. Boom.

The program didnt crash in this function, somehow the executable wasn't started which made the system crash.

The fix was to pass NULL for first parameter of CreateProcess and the full commandline as second. Not really sure why, probable something to do with what adeyblue said.

Code:

CreateProcessA(NULL, (char *)command.c_str(), NULL, NULL, FALSE, CREATE_NO_WINDOW, NULL, NULL, &info, &procInfo);