Thread: using command line arguments, which are not single chars

Dear forum

I would like to read parameters from the command line. I would like to give a parameter that controls the overall mode of the program, valid modes are “count”, “head”, “stat” and “CSV”. For user convenience I would like to allow the use of single letter short forms “c”, “h”, “s” and the lower case form “csv”.

I tried the code below, but it seems that argv[1] is not really a string, even though printf() seems to accept it as a string argument.

Can any one please tell how I get the string information in argv[1] into a string variable that will allow me to something like the code below.

I did look in the FAQ, but it only shows printf() and single char (like argv[1][1] == '-') usage.

Best Regards
Moses

Code:

   if (argv[1]=="c" || argv[1]=="count") {
      printf( " mode: count\n" );
   }
   else {
      if (argv[1]=="h" || argv[1]=="head") {
         printf(" mode: head\n");
      }
      else {
         if (argv[1]=="s" || argv[1]=="stat") {
            printf(" mode: stat\n");
         }
         else {
            if (argv[1]=="csv" || argv[1]=="CSV") {
               printf(" mode: CSV\n");
            }
            else {
               printf(" Unknown mode: %s\n",argv[1]);
            }
         }
      }
   }

Thanks ... Now it looks like below, and works perfect:

Code:

   strcpy(cmd,argv[1]); // copy to string 'short name' variable
   for (i=0; cmd[i]; i++)
     cmd[i] = tolower(cmd[i]); // make it all lower case

   if (strcmp(cmd,"c")==0 || strcmp(cmd,"count")==0) {
	   printf( " mode: Count\n" );
   }
   else {
	   if (strcmp(cmd,"h")==0 || strcmp(cmd,"head")==0) {
		   printf(" mode: Head\n");
	   }
	   else {
		   if (strcmp(cmd,"s")==0 || strcmp(cmd,"stat")==0) {
			   printf(" mode: Stat\n");
		   }
		   else {
			   if (strcmp(cmd,"csv")==0) {
				   printf(" mode: CSV\n");
			   }
			   else {
				   printf(" Unknown mode: %s\n",cmd);
			   }
		   }
	   }
   }