Question

I’m having some trouble with a program. My goal is to have it open several .exe files with optional args passed. For example if I wanted to open up a pdf I could type the string below into a cmd window.

// If used in a cmd window it will open up my PDF reader and load MyPDF.pdf file
"c:\Test space\SumatraPDF.exe" "c:\Test space\Sub\MyPDF.pdf"

Here are two tries I used. The first opens the PDF but of course doesn’t load the file. The second simply doesn’t work.

// Opens the PDF in my program
system("\"C:\\Test space\\SumatraPDF.exe\"");

// Error I get inside of a cmd window is the comment below
// 'C:\Test' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
//system("\"C:\\Test space\\SumatraPDF.exe\" \"C:\\Test space\\Sub\\MyPDF.pdf\"");

I’m unsure of the reason why the second one does not work. It could be I’m misunderstanding something about system, or I’m not using delimiters right.

I feel like there is a library out there designed for this rather than creating a long string that uses so many delimiters.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Welcome to Stack Overflow!

The system method works by passing it’s argument to cmd /c. So you will need an extra set of quotes around it. See related question posted by sled.

As an alternative to system, take a look at the ShellExecute or ShellExecuteEx Win32 API function. It has more features although it is not as portable.

// ShellExecute needs COM to be initialized
CoInitializeEx(NULL, COINIT_APARTMENTTHREADED | COINIT_DISABLE_OLE1DDE);

SHELLEXECUTEINFO sei = {0};
sei.cbSize = sizeof(sei);
sei.lpFile = prog;   // program like c:\Windows\System32\notepad.exe
sei.lpParameters = args;  // program arguments like c:\temp\foo.txt
sei.nShow = SW_NORMAL;  // app should be visible and not maximized or minimized

ShellExecuteEx(&sei);  // launch program

CoUninitialize();

More information here.