On Windows, how does console window ownership work?

Question

When a console application is started from another console application, how does console ownership work?

I see four possibilities:

1. The second applicati

Answer 1

None of your four possibilities is actually the case, and the answer to your follow-on question, "Which of the two processes is responsible for managing the window?", is that neither process is responsible. TUI programs don't have to know anything about windows at all, and, under the covers, aren't necessarily even plumbed in to the GUI.

Consoles are objects, accessed via handles just like files, directories, pipes, processes, and threads. A single process doesn't "own" a console via its handle to it any more than a process "owns" any file that it has an open handle to. Handles to consoles are inherited by child processes from their parents in the same way that all other (inheritable) handles are. Your TUI application, spawned by CMD, simply inherits the standard handles that CMD said that it should inherit, when it called CreateProcess() — which are usually going to be CMD's standard input, output, and error (unless the command-line told CMD to use some other handles as the child's standard input, output, and error).

Consoles aren't dependent upon CMD. They exist as long as there are (a) any open handles to the console's input or output buffers or (b) any processes otherwise "attached" to the console. So in your example you could kill CMD, but only when you terminated the child process too would the console actually be destroyed.

The process that is in charge of displaying the GUI windows in which consoles are presented is, in Windows NT prior to version 6.1, CSRSS, the Client-Server Runtime SubSystem. The window handling code is in WINSRV.DLL, which contains the "console server" that — under the covers — Win32 programs performing console I/O make LPC calls to. In Windows NT 6.1, this functionality, for reasons covered by Raymond Chen, moved out of CSRSS into a less-privileged process that CSRSS spawns.