C#/.NET: Detect whether program is being run as a service or a console application [duplicate]

Answer 1

Environment.UserInteractive will do the magic.

Answer 2

I don't know if this will work, but you may want to try using PInvoke with this code and checking if the parent is "services.exe".

Answer 3

I haven't tried it, but it's possible that Process.GetCurrentProcess will help - under console mode the process name would be the same as the executable, whereas I'd expect (and again, please check!) that when running as a service it would be different.

Answer 4

I ended up detecting whether or not I was in a console application by checking Console.IsErrorRedirected. It returned "false" for console apps, and "true" for the non-console apps I tested. I could have also used IsOutputRedirected.

I imagine there are circumstances where these will not be accurate, but this worked well for me.

Answer 5

Using the ParentProcessUtilities struct from this answer about finding a parent process, you can do this:

static bool RunningAsService() {
    var p = ParentProcessUtilities.GetParentProcess();
    return ( p != null && p.ProcessName == "services" );
}

Note that the process name for the parent process does not include the extension ".exe".

Answer 6

Might want to try SessionId property of the Process object. In my experience SessionId is set to 0 if the process is running a service.