Posts tagged Console control handler

Some of our testapps or applications are console applications and testers usually crash those by applying Ctrl+C. This is because Console will forcefully terminate the application if it receives a Ctrl+C. For those situation, you can handle the Ctrl+C yourself and can do graceful exit.

You can use the function – SetConsoleCtrlHandler() to register a callback function to handle Ctrl+C events from the console. See the following code snippet.

BOOL CtrlHandler(DWORD dwCtrlType)
{
    if( CTRL_C_EVENT == dwCtrlType)
    {
        // Recd Ctrl+C. Write your clean up code here.
    }
}

void main()
{
    SetConsoleCtrlHandler(
      (PHANDLER_ROUTINE) CtrlHandler, // handler function
      TRUE); // add to list
}

Together with Ctrl+C you can handle more console events. See the list.

• CTRL_CLOSE_EVENT
• CTRL_LOGOFF_EVENT
• CTRL_SHUTDOWN_EVENT
• CTRL_BREAK_EVENT

Targeted Audience – Intermediate.