Windows-Autostart: Application directory seems to be C:/Windows/system32/

Question

When my app is started from the autostart of Windows, Qt is not able to open it. The error that causes this is that QDir().absoluteFilePath("settings.cnf") returns the path C:/Windows/system32/settings.cnf even though my file is located in my working directory.

Does someone know what method I must call to get the right path?

Answer 1

Using the default constructor QDir() defaults to the current working directory, which can be anything, depending from where the user or the system started the application. For a UI application, that's a path one should usually ignore completely.

To access data next to your application binary, use QCoreApplication::applicationDirPath(). This is usually used for global read-only data installed with the program.

For user-writable configuration settings and cached data, use QStandardPaths (Qt 5) or QDesktopServices::storageLocation() (Qt 4).