Question

I’m writing a cross-platform C++ program using Qt and I want to package/embed a number of binary executables within the program. The program should be able to execute these binaries at runtime.

I figured, I would need QResource and QProcess using start() and the “:/…” notation, but I don’t seem to get the process running. Is there anything I am missing? Should it work like this? Does the binary need to be set as executable?

Background: I am writing a tool which uses Git and I don’t want to require the end-user to install Git manually.

(Trying this on Mac OS X, BTW.)

Update:

I am using the following code (C++, Qt on Mac OS X):

QString program = ":/git";
QStringList arguments;
arguments << "help" << "commit";
myProcess->start(program, arguments);

The Git executable is in the project path, my resources.qrc references it like so:

<qresource prefix="/">
    <file>git</file>
</qresource>

I’m not getting an error, but the program is not executed. Behavior is the same when I set program to a non-existing file. Replacing ":/git" by the absolute path to git works perfectly.

Answer 1

You can’t execute a program directly from a resource.

If you had a program in a resource and you wanted to execute it, you’d first have to read it out of the resource, write it to a file, make the file executable, then execute it.

Also, when you say that you’re not getting an error, that probably means that you aren’t checking for errors properly.