Show Explorer's properties dialog for a file in Windows

Question

Is there an easy way to show the properties dialog for a file in Windows using Python?

I'm trying to show the same window that pops up when you right click a file in Explorer and choose Properties.

Answer 1

The way to do this is to call the Windows ShellExecuteEx() API passing the properties verb. There are various high-level Python wrappers of this but I have not succeeded in getting any of them to work with the properties verb. Instead I would use good old ctypes.

import time
import ctypes
import ctypes.wintypes

SEE_MASK_NOCLOSEPROCESS = 0x00000040
SEE_MASK_INVOKEIDLIST = 0x0000000C

class SHELLEXECUTEINFO(ctypes.Structure):
    _fields_ = (
        ("cbSize",ctypes.wintypes.DWORD),
        ("fMask",ctypes.c_ulong),
        ("hwnd",ctypes.wintypes.HANDLE),
        ("lpVerb",ctypes.c_char_p),
        ("lpFile",ctypes.c_char_p),
        ("lpParameters",ctypes.c_char_p),
        ("lpDirectory",ctypes.c_char_p),
        ("nShow",ctypes.c_int),
        ("hInstApp",ctypes.wintypes.HINSTANCE),
        ("lpIDList",ctypes.c_void_p),
        ("lpClass",ctypes.c_char_p),
        ("hKeyClass",ctypes.wintypes.HKEY),
        ("dwHotKey",ctypes.wintypes.DWORD),
        ("hIconOrMonitor",ctypes.wintypes.HANDLE),
        ("hProcess",ctypes.wintypes.HANDLE),
    )

ShellExecuteEx = ctypes.windll.shell32.ShellExecuteEx
ShellExecuteEx.restype = ctypes.wintypes.BOOL

sei = SHELLEXECUTEINFO()
sei.cbSize = ctypes.sizeof(sei)
sei.fMask = SEE_MASK_NOCLOSEPROCESS | SEE_MASK_INVOKEIDLIST
sei.lpVerb = "properties"
sei.lpFile = "C:\\Desktop\\test.txt"
sei.nShow = 1
ShellExecuteEx(ctypes.byref(sei))
time.sleep(5)

The reason I put in the call to sleep is that the properties dialog is shown as a window in the calling process. If the Python executable terminates immediately following the call to ShellExecuteEx, then there is nothing there to service the dialog and it does not show.