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25.1 Program Arguments

The system starts a C program by calling the function main. It is up to you to write a function named main—otherwise, you won’t even be able to link your program without errors.

In ISO C you can define main either to take no arguments, or to take two arguments that represent the command line arguments to the program, like this:

int main (int argc, char *argv[])

The command line arguments are the whitespace-separated tokens given in the shell command used to invoke the program; thus, in ‘cat foo bar’, the arguments are ‘foo’ and ‘bar’. The only way a program can look at its command line arguments is via the arguments of main. If main doesn’t take arguments, then you cannot get at the command line.

The value of the argc argument is the number of command line arguments. The argv argument is a vector of C strings; its elements are the individual command line argument strings. The file name of the program being run is also included in the vector as the first element; the value of argc counts this element. A null pointer always follows the last element: argv[argc] is this null pointer.

For the command ‘cat foo bar’, argc is 3 and argv has three elements, "cat", "foo" and "bar".

In Unix systems you can define main a third way, using three arguments:


The first two arguments are just the same. The third argument envp gives the program’s environment; it is the same as the value of environ. See Environment Variables. POSIX.1 does not allow this three-argument form, so to be portable it is best to write main to take two arguments, and use the value of environ.
