Embed .exe file into C++ program?

Question

I wrote a c++ program and I want to execute my second program inside it, which is a exe file. The problem is I want to share my program to others as one single file.

When I search on the internet, I found this solution.

Just store the second .exe file as a binary resource inside the main .exe using an .rc file at compile-time. At run-time, you can access it using FindResource(), LoadResource(), and LockResource(), and then write it out to a temp file on disk before passing it to system().

But I don't understand how to "store the .exe file as a binary resource"

I am currently using CreateProcess() to start my second program which working greatly. Can anyone write some example for me?

Answer 1

In your project's resource script (the .rc file in which icons, dialogs, etc. are defined), you can add a binary resource with a line like the following:

IDB_EMBEDEXE    BINARY      "<path>\\EmbedProgram.exe"

Where the IDB_EMBEDEXE token/macro should be defined in a header file that is included by both that resource script and any C++ source(s) that use(s) it; this will be the lpName argument given to the FindResource() call, which you can form using MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDB_EMBEDEXE). Specify "BINARY" (or L"BINARY" for Unicode builds) for the lpType argument.

Like this:

#define IDB_EMBEDEXE 13232 // Or whatever suitable value you need
//...
// In the C++ code:
HRSRC hResource = FindResource(NULL, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDB_EMBEDEXE), _TEXT("BINARY"));
HGLOBAL hGlobal = LoadResource(NULL, hResource);
size_t exeSiz = SizeofResource(NULL, hResource); // Size of the embedded data
void*  exeBuf = LockResource(hGlobal);           // usable pointer to that data

// You can now write the buffer to disk using "exeBuf" and "exeSiz"

The specified executable file will then be completely embedded (as a binary) resource in your built executable, and can be extracted, written to disk and executed as described in the article you quote.