Hide CMD window on Windows

[federico-terzi]

Hi,
Thank you for the wonderful library.
I'm currently writing a tool on Windows that spawns commands through CMD and then gets the output. Using the standard std::process API, the prompt window flashes for a short while before disappearing, which is kind of annoying.
It seems like the way to solve the problem would be to set the CREATE_NO_WINDOW flag and I saw there was a PR #7 for that reason.
Is there a way to specify that flag with the current library API?

[hniksic]

There is currently no support for CREATE_NO_WINDOW. #7 had issues and was apparently abandoned by the reporter.

The way to avoid the console window is to fix the command that requests it. It is my understanding that the console window is requested by the process you're starting, not by subprocess or equivalent API. If you were to start a GUI program, the console wouldn't flash.

Having said that, it definitely sounds useful to be able to optionally suppress the console window when starting executables you can't modify. A PR that does that correctly would be accepted, it's just not trivial because the APIs to do so are poorly documented.

[federico-terzi]

@hniksic Thank you for the reply and the explanation.

I'll experiment a bit and see if I can get it to work. If successful, I'll open a PR as you suggested.

Thanks again

[hniksic]

Closing due to lack of activity. @federico-terzi please reopen (or create a PR) if you find a way to do this.

[federico-terzi]

Thank you @hniksic. Sorry for the lack of response! In the end, the problem was indeed in my program as you suggested and I was able to solve it with these steps: espanso/espanso#249 (comment)

Hope this will help anyone suffering from the same issue :)