Question

I am using _popen to start a process to run a command and gather the output

This is my c++ code:

bool exec(string &cmd, string &result)
{
   result = "";

   FILE* pipe = _popen(cmd.c_str(), "rt");
   if (!pipe)
      return(false);

   char buffer[128];
   while(!feof(pipe))
   {
        if(fgets(buffer, 128, pipe) != NULL)
               result += buffer;
   }
   _pclose(pipe);
   return(true);
}

Is there any way of doing this without a console window opening (as it currently does at the _popen statement)?

Answer 1

As far as I know, you can’t¹: you are starting a console application (cmd.exe, that will run the specified command), and Windows always creates a console window when starting a console application.

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1. although, you can hide the window after the process started, or even create it hidden if you pass the appropriate flags to CreateProcess; problem is, _popen do not pass these flags, so you have to use the Win32 APIs instead of _popen to create your pipe.