Receiving a Sharing Violation Opening a File Code 32

I have been trying the following piece of code that does not work. What I am trying to do is to start executing my exe (one that I created a simple dialog based application using VC6.0) then from inside this application modify its own contents stored on the hard drive.

So there is a running copy of the exe and from this running copy it will open the disk copy into a buffer. Once loaded into a buffer then begin a search for a string. On开发者_如何学Goce the string is found it will be replaced with another string which may not be the same size as the original.

Right now I am having an issue of not being able to open the file on disk for reading/writing. GetLastError returns the following error "ERROR_SHARING_VIOLATION The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.".

So what I did I renamed the file on disk to another name (essential same name except for the extension). Same error again about sharing violation. I am not sure why I am getting this sharing violation error code of 32. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I'll ask my second part of the question in another thread.

FILE * pFile;

pFile = fopen ("Test.exe","rb");

if (pFile != NULL)
{
     // do something like search for a string
}
else
{
    // fopen failed.
    int value = GetLastError();  // returns 32

    exit(1);
}

Read the Windows part of the File Locking wikipedia entry: you can't modify files that are currently executing.

You can rename and copy them, but you can't change them. So what you are trying to do is simply not possible. (Renaming the file doesn't unlock it at all, it's still the same file after the rename, so still not modifiable.)

You could copy your executable, modify that copy, then run that though.