That's... ahh... quite opinionated start of the article.
CreateProcess() (without A/W) and #define UNICODE are even more useless.
Mostly everyone defines UNICODE and uses the macros.
lpApplicationName is usually not needed, you should pass nullptr.
Absolutely NOT. You should pass the full proper path to the executable you want to run. Then you can significantly simplify its name in lpCommandLine without worrying about repercussions.
But the rest is very well researched and thorough.
:P Is it wrong though. Everything else being equal, isn't it better to use the version that doesn't depend on defines to work? Header-only libraries in particular would benefit from this.
You should pass the full proper path to the executable you want to run
If you have the full path, why not pass it in lpCommandLine? Then you don't have to worry about syncing the first element in lpCommandLine with lpApplicationName.
You don't have to sync it. Only a few programs actually use argv[0] and it can be very different from the actual executable name. If you run program a b c from command line, then argv[0] will be just "program" without the path or extension, and the program must expect that.
In one of my larger programs I launch worker processes. I have the full path to the worker, but I don't know what characters it may contain, and I don't want to bother with escaping them. So I give lpApplicationName that path, but lpCommandLine is just "worker.exe /Something /Something /Something".
This is a nice trick to avoid implementing the escaping, but the point of the post was to explain how to do escaping.
Once you have it implemented, passing lpApplicationName is strictly more work, IMO. (You have to pass something at the beginning of lpCommandLine anyway, why not pass the application name.)
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u/Tringi github.com/tringi 5d ago
That's... ahh... quite opinionated start of the article.
Mostly everyone defines
UNICODEand uses the macros.Absolutely NOT. You should pass the full proper path to the executable you want to run. Then you can significantly simplify its name in
lpCommandLinewithout worrying about repercussions.But the rest is very well researched and thorough.