Shell Call

AddOn to MultipleExes.

I have had a hard time with the call Shell (in VB6):

  Shell programPath & fileToOpen, vbNormalFocus 

just won't work,

This has to be written as:

  Shell programPath & " " & fileToOpen, vbNormalFocus 

So a space is required between the programPath and the fileToOpen (or Command$).

Next it will run fine but then suddenly errors occur. This is caused by a space within the programPath itself, e.g.:

 programPath="C:Folder\Sub Folder\my app.exe" 

will be read as

You have to add """" to the string to solve this.

So you have to write:

  Shell chr(34) & programPath & chr(34) & " " &  chr(34) & fileToOpen  & chr(34)

This will work fine.

In VB6 you can handle the string chr(34) & fileToOpen & chr(34) as Command$ by the program that is called, so you can write code like:

 if Command$ <> "" then ... else...  

This is also the easy way to pass all kind of information to another exe, when you use MultipleExes.

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Apart from Shell, you can also use the api ShellExecute?, this will open any file in the the program it's associated to.

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Category VisualBasic