CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonwindowswinapi
Gary Hughes
Gary Hughes

Reputation: 4510

Show Explorer's properties dialog for a file in Windows

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.

Upvotes: 10

Views: 2117

Answers (1)

David Heffernan
David Heffernan

Reputation: 612814

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.

Upvotes: 8

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