Get path of executable

Question

I know this question has been asked before but I still haven\'t seen a satisfactory answer, or a definitive \"no, this cannot be done\", so I\'ll ask again!

All I wa

Answer 1

For Windows, you have the problem of how to strip the executable from the result of GetModuleFileName(). The Windows API call PathRemoveFileSpec() that Nate used for that purpose in his answer changed between Windows 8 and its predecessors. So how to remain compatible with both and safe? Luckily, there's C++17 (or Boost, if you're using an older compiler). I do this:

#include 
#include 
#include 
namespace fs = std::experimental::filesystem;

// We could use fs::path as return type, but if you're not aware of
// std::experimental::filesystem, you probably handle filenames
// as strings anyway in the remainder of your code.  I'm on Japanese
// Windows, so wide chars are a must.
std::wstring getDirectoryWithCurrentExecutable()
{
    int size = 256;
    std::vector charBuffer;
    // Let's be safe, and find the right buffer size programmatically.
    do {
        size *= 2;
        charBuffer.resize(size);
        // Resize until filename fits.  GetModuleFileNameW returns the
        // number of characters written to the buffer, so if the
        // return value is smaller than the size of the buffer, it was
        // large enough.
    } while (GetModuleFileNameW(NULL, charBuffer.data(), size) == size);
    // Typically: c:/program files (x86)/something/foo/bar/exe/files/win64/baz.exe
    // (Note that windows supports forward and backward slashes as path
    // separators, so you have to be careful when searching through a path
    // manually.)

    // Let's extract the interesting part:
    fs::path path(charBuffer.data());  // Contains the full path including .exe
    return path.remove_filename()  // Extract the directory ...
               .w_str();           // ... and convert to a string.
}