Escape sequence for &

I'm wanting to do the following:

Code:

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sprintf (cmd,"ls %s > \\tmp\\out.tmp \&", stuff);
system( cmd );

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However I'm getting this error when compiling

warning: unknow escape sequence '\&'

What is the correct escape sequence for adding & using sprintf?

I can't make out what you need "bitwise and" for from your post

You don't need to escape ampersands.

I didn't know & was an illegal string character and you needed an escape sequence.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SlyMaelstrom

I didn't know & was an illegal string character and you needed an escape sequence.

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This code is to run on linux. The '&' is so a new process is created and my program can keep on processing instead of waiting for the other process to return.

You still don't need to escape the ampersand and the path to your output file should be "/tmp/out.tmp" instead of "\\tmp\\out.tmp".
The ampersand won't help you if you want your program to continue without waiting for the other process to finish. You'll need an asynchronous function for that.

I think spawn works in linux
If so, http://faq.cprogramming.com/cgi-bin/...&id=1043284392

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadCow257

I think spawn works in linux
If so, http://faq.cprogramming.com/cgi-bin/...&id=1043284392

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Yes I wanted to use the spawnl function...but ubuntu doesn't have the process.h header. I believe this has been a problem on other dist's also. BTW...I'm a very very newbie to programming in general, as you've probably gathered - which is why I'm trying to do things the easy way for now (eg system instead of exec() or spawl())

Thanks

> which is why I'm trying to do things the easy way for now
One of the things of being "easy" is that it has reduced functionality over say execl (there is no spawn in Linux as far as I know). If you want to do something complex, then you have to get to grips with fork()/execl().

Besides, you got all the slashes wrong.

sprintf (cmd,"ls %s > /tmp/out.tmp &", stuff);
ought to work

ANSI escape sequences: http://www.liquifried.com/docs/useful/Cescapeseq.html

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Salem

> which is why I'm trying to do things the easy way for now
One of the things of being "easy" is that it has reduced functionality over say execl (there is no spawn in Linux as far as I know). If you want to do something complex, then you have to get to grips with fork()/execl().

Besides, you got all the slashes wrong.

sprintf (cmd,"ls %s > /tmp/out.tmp &", stuff);
ought to work

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Yeah I realised the slashes were wrong after posting...thanks for the response. Once I finish this app I guess I'll try and reimplement some of these things using exec/fork.