[skobes]

"Windows’ own API calls for creating new processes (such as CreateProcess [6], ShellExecute [7]) do not allow you to set argv[0]: it sets it for you, based on how the path to the executable was provided."

Isn't this contradicted by the docs? CreateProcess receives lpApplicationName and lpCommandLine, and they can be different.

[DSMan195276]

Yeah they have this incorrect. if you provide `lpApplicationName` and `lpCommandLine` then the application name is not automatically added to the command line string, you have to add it yourself to the string provided as `lpCommandLine`. I checked and the docs for `CreateProcess` briefly mention this issue:

> If both lpApplicationName and lpCommandLine are non-NULL, the null-terminated string pointed to by lpApplicationName specifies the module to execute, and the null-terminated string pointed to by lpCommandLine specifies the command line. The new process can use GetCommandLine to retrieve the entire command line. Console processes written in C can use the argc and argv arguments to parse the command line. _Because argv[0] is the module name, C programmers generally repeat the module name as the first token in the command line._

[magicalhippo]

Not the way I understand it. In the execv documentation[1], you pass the program name twice:

int execv(const char *path, char *const argv[]);

The argument path points to a pathname that identifies the new process image file.

The argument argv is an array of character pointers to null-terminated strings. [..] The value in argv[0] should point to a filename string that is associated with the process being started by one of the exec functions.

Windows does not allow you to do that, AFAIK.

[1]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/e...

[skobes]

> Windows does not allow you to do that, AFAIK.

It does though, using the lpCommandLine parameter to CreateProcess as I said.

CreateProcess("main.exe", "foobar", ...)

argv[0] is "foobar"

[magicalhippo]

I stand corrected. Been ages since I used Win32 API a lot, and I realized I can't recall using both of those arguments when calling CreateProcess.