Command Line Arguments

It is possible to pass arguments to C programs when they are executed. The brackets which follow main are used for this purpose. argc refers to the number of arguments passed, and argv[] is a pointer array which points to each argument which is passed to mainA simple example follows, which checks to see if a single argument is supplied on the command line when the program is invoked.

#include <stdio.>h main( int argc, char *argv[] ) { if( argc == 2 ) printf("The argument supplied is %s\n", argv[1]); else if( argc > 2 ) printf("Too many arguments supplied.\n"); else printf("One argument expected.\n"); }

Note that *argv[0] is the name of the program invoked, which means that *argv[1] is a pointer to the first argument supplied, and *argv[n] is the last argument. If no arguments are supplied, argc will be one. Thus for n arguments, argc will be equal to n + 1. The program is called by the command line:

$myprog argument1

More clearly, Suppose a program is compiled to an executable program myecho and that the program is executed with the following command.

$myeprog aaa bbb ccc

When this command is executed, the command interpreter calls the main() function of the myprog program with 4 passed as the argc argument and an array of 4 strings as the argv argument.

argv[0] - "myprog" argv[1] - "aaa" argv[2] - "bbb" argv[3] - "ccc"