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Tuesday 3 December 2013

How to use CreateProcess API Call to create and execute a new process in Delphi XE4?

How to use CreateProcess API Call to create and execute a new process in Delphi XE4?

Executing a program or process in Win32 means loading a process and its child thread(s) in memory. CreateProcess is used to create and run the process in Win32. We will see how to use CreateProcess in Delphi XE4 to execute an exe? For backward compatibility, the Win16 calls for executing programs, WinExec and ShellExecute are still supported in the Windows API, and still work. But for 32-bit programs, they're considered obsolete.

The following code utilizes the CreateProcess API call, and will execute any program, DOS or Windows.

procedure ExecuteNewProcess(ProgramName : String; Wait: Boolean);
var
  StartInfo : TStartupInfo;
  ProcInfo : TProcessInformation;
  CreateOK : Boolean;
begin 
  FillChar(StartInfo,SizeOf(TStartupInfo),#0);
  FillChar(ProcInfo,SizeOf(TProcessInformation),#0);
  StartInfo.cb := SizeOf(TStartupInfo);
  
  CreateOK := CreateProcess(nil, PChar(ProgramName), nil, nil,False,
              CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP+NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS,
              nil, nil, StartInfo, ProcInfo);

  try
    if CreateOK then //Check if the process is created successfully
    begin
      if Wait then WaitForSingleObject(ProcInfo.hProcess, INFINITE); //Load children processes
    end
    else
    begin
      ShowMessage('Unable to run '+ProgramName);
    end;
  finally
    CloseHandle(ProcInfo.hProcess);
    CloseHandle(ProcInfo.hThread);
  end;
end;

In above code, I will pass an executable file to ExecuteNewProcess method lets say abc.exe.

Relation between Threads and Processes

Here it is very important to mention the relation between threads and processes. Threads are children of processes; while processes, on the other hand, are inert system entities that essentially do absolutely nothing but define a space in memory for threads to run - threads are the execution portion of a process and a process can have many threads attached to it. So, we can say, processes are merely memory spaces for threads.

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