using spawnl for a dos program

I've been working on this program in which I want to use spawnl to run another app. My question is how can I assign the spawned program to a variable? For example, I will read in the program to spawn in from a cfg file (text.)

void runProgram(char fileName[])
{
int flag;

flag = spawnl(P_WAIT, fileName, NULL);

if(flag == -1)
blah

The fileName is read in from the file and passed to runProgram after using strlen to make sure the name is valid. In the cfg file, the name appears as something like "C:\DOS\EDIT.COM"

I've also tried spawnlp but I am still unable to process the request. Do I need to allocate additional memory or include the environment? If so, how exactly do I do that? The error returned is always ENOENT. If I move EDIT.COM into the working directory and use spawnl(P_WAIT, "EDIT.COM", NULL) it works, but this isn't what my program needs. Can anyone help?

TIA

You are not passing the argument argv[0] to the function spawnl().
It should be like:

Code:

---

flag = spawnl(P_WAIT, fileName, progname, NULL);

---

In addition to what shaik786 said

> and use spawnl(P_WAIT, "EDIT.COM", NULL) it works,
spawn functions do not search your PATH environment looking for directories containing the program you want to run

So it needs to be
spawnl(P_WAIT, "C:\\DOS\\EDIT.COM", "C:\\DOS\\EDIT.COM", NULL);

or

Code:

---

void fn ( char *prog ) {
    spawnl(P_WAIT, prog, prog, NULL);
}

fn ( "C:\\DOS\\EDIT.COM" );

---

Ok if I understand this right, I need to pass the program name twice? I did something wrong as I got a compiler error using a pointer to the arguments, so I removed the pointers and it compiled.

Ignoring the correct syntax for a momment, how exactly would I do the following? If this were the dos command line:

pkunzip -v somezip.zip

The program reads in the cfg file as

2 7 c:\pkware\pkunzip.exe -v c:\zips\somezip.zip

I limit each char [] to a size of 30 so not to exceed the total size allowed by spawn.

The 2 and 7 are ints that set the bg and fg colors and are picked up prior to reading the important part. I wrote the function as

void getMenu(char fileName[], char arg1[], char arg2[])

spawnl(P_WAIT, fileName, arg1, arg2, NULL);

This sort of worked; it ran pkunzip but extracted files. It didn't recognize the -v switch, but it did unzip the file named in arg2. It also did some odd things if the input file string wasn't formatted just so. So would I use this then?

spawnl(P_WAIT, fileName, fileName, arg1, arg2, NULL) ?

This is my first experience with this sort of thing. Thanks for the replies.

sheeeese the board didn't allow me more than 2 minutes to write a post before it logged me out. The above reply is mine.

> I need to pass the program name twice?
Sort of

The first filename is the absolute path to the program you want to run.

The second filename (and all the other parameters) are used to create the 'C' argv[] to pass to main. By convention, argv[0] is a copy of the program path, but it need not be the complete path.

So these would be valid
spawnl(P_WAIT, "C:\\DOS\\EDIT.COM", "C:\\DOS\\EDIT.COM", NULL);
spawnl(P_WAIT, "C:\\DOS\\EDIT.COM", "EDIT.COM", NULL);


> spawnl(P_WAIT, fileName, fileName, arg1, arg2, NULL) ?
Yes - seems good to me

I suggest you try compiling this program, then calling it via spawn to see what I mean

Code:

---

#include <stdio.h>
int main ( int argc, char *argv[] ) {
    int i;
    for ( i = 0 ; i < argc ; i++ ) {
        printf( "Arg %d = `%s`\n", i, argv[i] );
    }
    return 0;
}

---

Thanks to all that have replied, and salem, I *think* that I now have a better understanding of what's going on here. Forgive my coding methods, but it's a habit that I cannot break :)

What do you guys think of this? I'm still missing something here and I think it's the particular spawning member that I'm using. Spawnl is used when I know the exact number of arguments that are to be entered right? But what if the program doesn't know the exact arguements? Here is a really stripped down version of what I've got done.

Code:

---


// .h includes //

void spawnMe(char *, char *, char *);

int main()
{
    int counter, ch;
    char *buff1, *buff2, *buff3;
    char fname[] = "applist.cfg";

    ifstream inFile;  // can't figure out how to use FILE *string :P

    inFile.open(fname, ios::in);

    if(inFile.fail())
    {
        blah
    }
   
    counter = 1;

    while((ch = inFile.peek()) != EOF)
    {
          inFile >> buff1 >> buff2 >> buff3;
          printf("\nTask [%d] press any key to launch %s ", counter, buff1);
          getch();
          spawnMe(buff1, buff2, buff3);
          counter++;
    }

    printf("\nThe End.");

    return 0;
}

void spawnMe(char *arg0, char *arg1, char *arg2)
{
    int flag;

    flag = spawnl(P_WAIT, arg0, arg0, arg1, arg2, NULL);

    if(flag == -1)
      // error message
}

---

The structure of the cfg file is

c:\pkware\pkzip.exe myzip.zip *.*
c:\pkware\pkunzip.exe -v myzip.zip
c:\windows\command\edit.com mytext.txt NULL
c:\windows\command\chkdsk.exe NULL NULL

How can I get rid of having to add NULL in the cfg file when I don't need the extra argument? I was rather stunned to see this work without hanging up at some point. Thanks for your help guys.