Hide Shelled Application

[Gary Cee]

I need to run another application from within my VB application and I need to have my app wait for the shelled process to terminate.

I know I can use Shell ("XXXXX"), vbHide to hide the shelled app while it's running or I can use the ExecCmd approach from MS knowledge base article Q129796 to cause my app to wait for the shelled app to end. Is there a way I can accomplish both waiting & hiding at the same time?

Thanks.

[Nucleus]

Option Explicit

Private Const STANDARD_RIGHTS_REQUIRED = &HF0000
Private Const SYNCHRONIZE = &H100000 ' Remove the spaces between the digits 
Private Const PROCESS_ALL_ACCESS = (STANDARD_RIGHTS_REQUIRED Or SYNCHRONIZE Or &HFFF)
Private Const STATUS_TIMEOUT = &H102
 
Private Declare Function WaitForSingleObject Lib "kernel32" (ByVal hHandle As Long, ByVal dwMilliseconds As Long) As Long
Private Declare Function OpenProcess Lib "kernel32" (ByVal dwDesiredAccess As Long, ByVal bInheritHandle As Long, ByVal dwProcessID As Long) As Long
Private Declare Function CloseHandle Lib "kernel32" (ByVal hObject As Long) As Long
 
Public sub SyncShell(PathName, Optional WindowStyle As VbAppWinStyle = vbMinimizedFocus)
    'Yonatan, modified by Nucleus
    Dim dwProcessID As Long, hProcess As Long
    
    dwProcessID = Shell(PathName, WindowStyle)
    hProcess = OpenProcess(PROCESS_ALL_ACCESS, False, dwProcessID)
    
    If hProcess  Then 
    
        Do
            DoEvents
        Loop While WaitForSingleObject(hProcess, 0) = STATUS_TIMEOUT
 
    end if
 
End Sub

Usage:
call syncshell("c:\temp\test.bat")

To hide the shelled app pass vbHide as the second argument

[Gary Cee]

Thanks for the reply. It really helped.

[Nucleus]

np.