Forum posts for spoolsv.exe

Calling fopen on Windows core files returns NULL pointer

I am trying to open a couple different files via their absolute path (determined elsewhere, programmatically), so I can get their SHA1 hash*, some of which are core windows files. fopen() is returning NULL on some (but not all) files when I attempt to open them as follows (normally the filename is gotten via QueryFullProcessImageName but I hardcoded it just in case):

char * filename = 'c:\windows\system32\spoolsv.exe';
FILE * currFileRead = fopen(filename, 'rb');
if (currFileRead == NULL)
{
printf('Failed to open %s, error %s ', filename, strerror(errno) );
}
else
{
//hashing code
}


The reported error is 2: 'No such file or directory', but obviously they're there. It also only fails for some processes, like spoolsv.exe or winlogon.exe, while svchost.exe and wininint.exe seem to open just fine.

My program has administrative privileges, and I can't figure why some processes would fail while others opened without trouble?

*I'm using a method from LibTomCrypt (http://libtom.org/?page=features) which is open source with a permissive license. The call to sha1_process takes in a hash_state (internal to the library), an unsigned char buffer, and the length of the buffer. I need to read the file with fopen to get the file into memory for hashing.

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