Category: Geeky/Programming

SHGetFolderPath doesn’s seem to work on Windows 98. If you use it to try  to find like the “My Pictures” directory,  it will error out.  I have read that some versions of Win98 do work, depends on the version of shell32.dll (5 and greater). A workaround that you can use , which probably isn’t 100%  good, but works is looking for the My Pictures path in the registry  (HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerShell Folders). Just another quirky thing with the different Microsoft OS’s.

strcpy – Copies the content pointed by src to dest stopping after the terminating null-character is copied.
dest should have enough memory space allocated to contain src string.

strncpy – Copies the first num characters of src to dest.
No null-character is implicitly appended to dest after copying process. So dest may not be null-terminated if no null-caracters are copied from src.
If num is greater than the length of src, dest is padded with zeros until num.

Now, maybe I just dont know, but why would you use strcpy when strncpy is available? I guess I really havent found a solid answer. I mean what were they thinking with strcpy? Were they just trying to create an easy way to have buffer overflows all over? (Same goes for strcat and strncat). I guess I am glad now to use C# and VB.net the majority of the time when you really don’t have to worry about this stuff. With C/C++ its all over the place, and you can tell, just look at all the buffer overflow vulnerabilites withing Microsoft products.

The last few days, I have been looking into a solution to kill a process in c/c++ – but not just any process, a ScreenSaver running while the computer is locked. Most examples on MSDN and such terminiate processes by sending close messages to them, and 99% of the time that works. It even works for ScreenSavers that are running while the computer is locked. Thing is, I didnt want to bundle kill.exe that comes on the Windows NT Resource kit. Off to search google, pskill by sysinternals works too, but again with the bundling. Search the net some more, I found a link to the kill.exe source code from MSDN. The big difference in this code compared to all other kill examples, is this

//
// Obtain the ability to manipulate other processes
//
EnableDebugPriv();

That opened the door for the kill.exe to stop a process when the computer was locked 100% of the time. Im sure there is some long explination dealing with user mode and kernel mode code, maybe someone can comment on and shed some more light on the subject. I have attached the source code that I found here just in case the site it was on goes down. Well, in the end, we ended up getting the program to kill the process while the computer was locked, so it worked out well 🙂