Execute a c program as a background process - c

Question

I am trying to make a background process in C to disable the visibility of the output/execution window. I used the following code but on using this the antivirus software reporst it as a threat and generates warnings:
HWND stealth;
AllocConsole();
stealth=FindWindowA("ConsoleWindowClass",NULL);
ShowWindow(stealth,0);
details are :
language : c
compiler : dev cpp
platform : windows 7/8
Is there any way I can create a background process in C without antivirus alerts?

Answer 1

If you just want an application that runs in the background without showing a console window, then the solution to your problem is far simpler: just don't create a console window!
Now, easier said than done. You've presumably created a Console application using the template in Visual Studio or some other IDE. This causes the application to be flagged when it is built as a Console application, and such applications always have a console window allocated to them on startup.
You don't want that, so you need to indicate that your application is not a Console application. In fact, it is just a regular Windows (Win32) application that doesn't show any windows. When writing a standard Windows application, no windows are created by default. If you don't create them in your code, then nothing gets created or displayed. And that's exactly what you want for a background process.
How you make this magic happen depends on your compiler/linker/IDE. Assuming you are using Visual Studio, you can follow these steps:
Right-click your project in the Solution Explorer.
Open the "Linker" category in the left-hand tree.
Select the "System" item in the tree.
Change the "Subsystem" setting to Windows, rather than Console.
That will automatically set the /SUBSYSTEM linker flag to specify WINDOWS, rather than CONSOLE.
(Edit: I just noticed that you said you're using Dev CPP. I've never used that IDE, but according to the directions I find online, you can just set the target to "GUI" in your project options. That should cause the -Wl,-subsystem,windows switch to be set when the linker is called. If not, find the linker flags in your project options and ensure that that switch is being passed.)
You will also need to take the final step of changing your application's entry point. Console applications have an entry point named main. For Windows applications, it is named wWinMain and has the following signature:
int WINAPI wWinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance,
HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
PWSTR pCmdLine,
int nCmdShow);
You should be able to simply change the signature of your main method to the above signature for wWinMain and be off to the races.
If you don't want to do it the right way, there is still a better option than what you're currently doing. Instead of issuing suspicious-looking commands to hunt around, look for a process, and hide its windows (just smacks of malware, doesn't it?), you can simply deallocate the console window that is automatically created for your application. To do that, call the FreeConsole function.
It takes no parameters, because a process can only ever be attached to one console. You don't need to tell it what to free because there is only one possibility. The console window will automatically be closed when it has been detached from all processes—if your application is the one that created it and the only one that was attached to it, that means it'll close automatically.
If you need a console window again for some reason, you can call AllocConsole.