Open a folder using Process Start

Question

I saw the other topic and I m having another problem  The process is starting  saw at task manager  but the folder is not opening on my screen  What s wrong   System Diagnostics Process Start  explorer exe     c  teste

User · Accepted Answer

Have you made sure that the folder  c  teste  exists  If it doesn t  explorer will open showing some default folder  in my case  C  Users  user name  Documents     Update  I have tried the following variations      opens the folder in explorer Process Start   c  temp       opens the folder in explorer Process Start  explorer exe     c  temp       throws exception Process Start   c  does not exist       opens explorer  showing some other folder  Process Start  explorer exe     c  does not exist      If none of these  well  except the one that throws an exception  work on your computer  I don t think that the problem lies in the code  but in the environment  If that is the case  I would try one  or both  of the following    Open the Run dialog  enter  explorer exe  and hit enter Open a command prompt  type  explorer exe  and hit enter

User · Answer

You should use one of the System Diagnostics Process Start   overloads  It s quite simple   If you don t place the filename of the process you want to run  explorer exe   the system will recognize it as a valid folder path and try to attach it to the already running Explorer process  In this case  if the folder is already open  Explorer will do nothing   If you place the filename of the process  as you did   the system will try to run a new instance of the process  passing the second string as a parameter  If the string is a valid folder  it is opened on the newly created process  if not  the new process will do nothing   I don t know how invalid folder paths are treated by the process in any case  Using System IO Directory Exists   should be enough to ensure that

User · Answer

You re escaping the backslash when the at sign does that for you   System Diagnostics Process Start  explorer exe    c  teste

User · Answer

You don t need the double backslash when using unescaped strings   System Diagnostics Process Start  explorer exe    c  teste

User · Answer

Just for completeness  if all you want to do is to open a folder  use this   System Diagnostics Process Start new System Diagnostics ProcessStartInfo         FileName    C   teste         UseShellExecute   true      Verb    open        Ensure FileName ends with Path DirectorySeparatorChar to make it unambiguously point to a folder   Thanks to  binki    This solution won t work for opening a folder and selecting an item  since there doesn t seem a verb for that

User · Answer

Use an overloaded version of the method that takes a ProcessStartInfo instance and set the ProcessWindowStyle property to a value that works for you

User · Answer

Do you have a lot of applications running when you are trying this  I encounter weird behavior at work sometimes because my system runs out of GDI Handles as I have so many windows open  our apps use alot    When this happens  windows and context menus no long appear until I close something to free up some GDI handles   The default limit in XP and Vista is 10000  It is not uncommon for my DevStudio to have 1500 GDI handles  so if you have a couple of copies of Dev studio open  it can eat them up pretty quickly  You can add a column in TaskManager to see how many handles are being used by each process   There is a registry tweak you can do to increase the limit    For more information see http   msdn microsoft com en-us library ms724291 VS 85  aspx

User · Answer

System Diagnostics Process Start  explorer exe    c  teste       This code works fine from the VS2010 environment and opens the local folder properly  but if you host the same application in IIS and try to open then it will fail for sure

User · Answer

You re using the   symbol  which removes the need for escaping your backslashes   Remove the   or replace    with

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Ive just had this issue  and i found out why  my reason isnt listed here so anyone else who gets this issue and none of these fix it   If you run Visual Studio as another user and attempt to use Process Start it will run in that users context and you will not see it on your screen

User · Answer

Strange   If it can t find explorer exe  you should get an exception  If it can t find the folder  it should still open some folder  eg my Documents   You say another copy of Explorer appears in the taskmanager  but you can t see it   Is it possible that it is opening offscreen  ie another monitor    Or are you by any chance doing this in a non-interactive service

User · Answer

Does it open correctly when you run  explorer exe c  teste  from your start menu  How long have you been trying this  I see a similar behavior when my machine has a lot of processes and when I open a new process sets say IE   it starts in the task manager but does not show up in the front end  Have you tried a restart   The following code should open a new explorer instance  class sample   static void Main       System Diagnostics Process Start  explorer exe    c  teste

User · Answer

If you want to select the file or folder you can use the following   Process Start  explorer exe     select  c   teste

User · Answer

System Diagnostics Process Start  explorer exe    c  teste     Just change the path or declare it in a string

[c#] Open a folder using Process.Start

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