ActiveState Community

After quite a bit of searching, I found an article on PerlMonks that explains how to disable the console window using Win32::API (and WITHOUT using PerlApp's "hide console" feature). It works!!! OK, so the console does show up for a second before it disappears, but that's liveable.

Article is here: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=536265

And here's the code to make it happen:

use Win32::API 0.20;

# just for completeness...
use constant SW_HIDE => 0;
use constant SW_SHOWNORMAL => 1;

# the API we need
my $GetConsoleTitle = new Win32::API('kernel32', 'GetConsoleTitle', 'PN', 'N');
my $SetConsoleTitle = new Win32::API('kernel32', 'SetConsoleTitle', 'P', 'N');
my $FindWindow = new Win32::API('user32', 'FindWindow', 'PP', 'N');
my $ShowWindow = new Win32::API('user32', 'ShowWindow', 'NN', 'N');

# save the current console title
my $old_title = " " x 1024;
$GetConsoleTitle->Call( $old_title, 1024 );

# build up a new (fake) title
my $title = "PERL-$$-".Win32::GetTickCount();

# sets our string as the console title
$SetConsoleTitle->Call( $title );

# sleep 40 milliseconds to let Windows rename the window
Win32::Sleep(40);

# find the window by title
$hw = $FindWindow->Call( 0, $title );

# restore the old title
$SetConsoleTitle->Call( $old_title );

# hide the console!
$ShowWindow->Call( $hw, SW_HIDE );

hey man. For this purposes i use an loader written on c

#include 
#include 

static char *ldr_file = "buildedapp.exe";
static char *ldr_path = "";

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  int code;
  LoadLibrary("shell32.dll");
  
  code = (int) ShellExecute(NULL, "open", ldr_file, ldr_path, NULL, SW_HIDE);
  if (code <= 32)
  {
	char buf[200];
	sprintf(buf, "Cannot run application. Code: %d", code);
	MessageBox(
		NULL,
		buf,
		"Dynld Error",
		MB_ICONERROR | MB_OK
	);
  }

  return code;
}

Okay, my C is a little rusty, but I see what you are doing.

So you compile the loader alone as an EXE and use it to invoke the PerlApp app? That's an interesting solution, but that means another file has to be included, right?

Thanks for the feedback!

In the meantime, I took the Win32::API code, stuck it in a module (Win32::HideConsole), and sumbitted it to CPAN. You can find it here: http://search.cpan.org/~phatwares/Win32-HideConsole-1.00/lib/Win32/HideC...