Command Line argument help, basic program

hello, i have only recently started learning C and i still havent really got to grips with the basics...

I am writing a program to determine the roots of a quadratic equation, using command line arguments. The program compiles... but doesnt do anything. I think the problem is that the program doesn't know what the variables a, b and c are. I need them to be the command line arguments (?) i.e you type "program_name a b c" ...but i'm stuck on how to make this work.

any pointers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated:

Code:

---

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int  main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  float a, b, c, droot, root1, root2;
  double discriminant = (pow(b,2) - (4 * a * c));

  if( argc != 3 )
    {  printf("3 co-efficients were not entered. Please enter them in the order a, b, c.\n");
      exit(1);
    }
  else if( discriminant < 0 )
    {
      printf("There are 0 roots.\n");
    }
  else if( discriminant == 0 )
    {
      printf("There is 1 root.\n");
      droot = (-b) / (2*a);
      printf("Root1=%f\n", droot);
    }
  else if( discriminant > 0 )
    {
      printf("There are 2 roots.\n");
      root1 = (-b + sqrt(discriminant)) / 2 * a;
      root2 = (-b - sqrt(discriminant)) / 2 * a;
      printf("Root1=%f Root2=%f.\n", root1, root2);
    }               
  return(0);

}

---

Thanks!

Don't you...uh....need to set a, b, and c? Oh, and by the way, you need to do that before you use them in any calculations. And if you're entering three arguments on the command line, argc would have to be 4 to be valid. The program name is always argv[0].

Code:

---


In your code:
int  main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  float a, b, c, droot, root1, root2;
  double discriminant = (pow(b,2) - (4 * a * c));  /////////// this is incorrect. a, b and c  contain junk here.

  if( argc != 3 )      //// This should probably be < 3..........
    {  printf("3 co-efficients were not entered. Please enter them in the order a, b, c.\n");
      exit(1);
    }
  /////////// else if( discriminant < 0 )    ///////////////// Change this from else if to just if
////////// this is where you start your math............
  if( discriminant < 0 )
    {
      printf("There are 0 roots.\n");
    }

---

After you determine that there are enough parameters passed from the command line you must now convert the command line argv[][] into numbers.

argv contains the values you are passing into your program as character strings. argv[0] contains the program name, argv[1] is what you want for a, argv[2] is b and so on.

You can change the cstrings to a double with atof().

Once you do the conversion then you can do the rest of your program.

Jim

okay ill get round to changing that in a bit! thanks for the help, ill probab;ly be using these forums quite a bit from now...