Introduction
To Execute a Console Application From VC++ and retrieve the messages shown in the console.
In many situations we may need to execute a console application or a DOS application from within our MFC application. ShellExcecute
can be used for this purpose, but can only be used to run the application. Messages shown in the console is not reachable. In such cases the following procedure can help.
Here we create a read write pipe (two separate pipes, one for reading and one for writing).
Then we use CreateProcess
to execute the process. Createprocess
must be supplied with pointers to variables of STARTUPINFO
and PROCESS_INFORMATION
structures.
The pipes created are assigned to STARTUPINFO
structure before it is passed to the CreateProcess
function.
The CreateProcess
function is used to run a new program.
CreateProcess(
LPCWSTR lpszImageName,
LPCWSTR lpszCmdLine,
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpsaProcess,
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpsaThread,
BOOL fInheritHandles,
DWORD fdwCreate,
LPVOID lpvEnvironment,
LPWSTR lpszCurDir,
LPSTARTUPINFOW lpsiStartInfo,
LPPROCESS_INFORMATION lppiProcInfo);
lpszImageName
Pointer to a null-terminated string that specifies the module to execute.
lpszCmdLine
Pointer to a null-terminated string that specifies the command line to execute. The system adds a null character to the command line, trimming the string if necessary, to indicate which file was actually used.
The function ExecuteExternalFile
, takes two arguments:
- the application to be executed.
- the arguments.
It executes the application and returns the messages that are printed into the console as a CString
.
CString ExecuteExternalFile(CString csExeName, CString csArguments)
{
CString csExecute;
csExecute=csExeName + " " + csArguments;
SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES secattr;
ZeroMemory(&secattr,sizeof(secattr));
secattr.nLength = sizeof(secattr);
secattr.bInheritHandle = TRUE;
HANDLE rPipe, wPipe;
CreatePipe(&rPipe,&wPipe,&secattr,0);
STARTUPINFO sInfo;
ZeroMemory(&sInfo,sizeof(sInfo));
PROCESS_INFORMATION pInfo;
ZeroMemory(&pInfo,sizeof(pInfo));
sInfo.cb=sizeof(sInfo);
sInfo.dwFlags=STARTF_USESTDHANDLES;
sInfo.hStdInput=NULL;
sInfo.hStdOutput=wPipe;
sInfo.hStdError=wPipe;
char command[1024]; strcpy(command,
csExecute.GetBuffer(csExecute.GetLength()));
CreateProcess(0 command,0,0,TRUE,
NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS|CREATE_NO_WINDOW,0,0,&sInfo,&pInfo);
CloseHandle(wPipe);
char buf[100];
DWORD reDword;
CString m_csOutput,csTemp;
BOOL res;
do
{
res=::ReadFile(rPipe,buf,100,&reDword,0);
csTemp=buf;
m_csOutput+=csTemp.Left(reDword);
}while(res);
return m_csOutput;
}
Hope this code will be useful for you.