How can I tell if the process is a service process using PID?

Question

Is there a way(API) that I can use to tell if the process is a service process if I know the pid of process?

Thanks in advance.

 

Answer 1

At most you can tell if a process has been registered as a service. Since applications can be created so they can run normally and be registered as a service then there is no way of figuring out if a process is a service, because in the end a service is an executable run by the service control manager which conforms to a certain set of interfaces.

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Any samples given are not meant to have error checking or show best practices. They are meant to just illustrate a point. I may also give inefficient code or introduce some problems to discourage copy/paste coding. This is because the major point of my posts is to aid in the learning process.
Visit my (not very good) blog at
http://c2kblog.blogspot.com/

Answer 2

EnumServicesStatusEx can return an ENUM_SERVICE_STATUS_PROCESS for every service on the system. This contains the PID of each returned service that's running.

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Phil Wilson

Answer 3

Maybe you can use "CreateToolhelp32Snapshot" / "EnumProcessModules" / "GetModuleFileName" ...etc to obtain some Info,and then check it;Or you can also check Reg. table. 

Answer 4

Phil:

Interesting, I'll have to remember that myself. There are so many things in Windows which you don't know about or are easy to miss.

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Any samples given are not meant to have error checking or show best practices. They are meant to just illustrate a point. I may also give inefficient code or introduce some problems to discourage copy/paste coding. This is because the major point of my posts is to aid in the learning process.
Visit my (not very good) blog at
http://c2kblog.blogspot.com/

Answer 5

Another way to determine if a PID is a service is to check it's parent PID, and whether that belongs to services.exe.  You can use ToolHelp to iterate processes; one of the fields of the each process info is the parent PID.

 

-- David