How to find window handle from exe file's name

Question

Imagine I have Firefox and I open Firefox Start Page, then I should have a Window with the title: "Mozilla Firefox Start Page - Mozilla Firefox".

I can find window handle with the code below

HWND hwnd = ::FindWindow(0, _T("Mozilla Firefox Start Page - Mozilla Firefox"));

But what I want is find window handle from the window's exe file's name like this

HWND hwnd = FindWindowFromExe(_T("firefox.exe"));//How to make this function?

Does windows Api has a function like FindWindowFromExe()? If it doesn't, what is the best way to Find window from its exe?

Thanks for reading :)

Solution

There is no single API function to find a window by its owning process's file name. You will have to search for it manually.

You can use EnumWindows() to enumerate all top-level windows, or use FindWindow()/FindWindowEx() to find/enumerate specific types of windows.

For each window, you can either:

• use GetWindowThreadProcessId() to get the process ID that owns the window, then
• use OpenProcess() to open a HANDLE to that process, then
• use GetModuleFileNameEx(), GetProcessImageFileName(), or QueryFullProcessImageName() to query the process for its full path and filename.

or

• use GetWindowModuleFileName() to query the window for the full path and filename of the module that created it (assuming the intended window is created by an actual EXE and not a DLL used by an EXE).

Once you have the window's filename, you can then compare that to your target filename.

Comments

[Remy Lebeau]

@RbMm: There is usually fewer windows running than process threads, so it would usually be faster and less overhead to enumerate the running windows directly and resolve their process names, than to enumerate all processes and all of their threads and all of their windows.