oh, so than that's probably what's wrong. Well as far as what's going wrong, it just doesn't execute the command ls -l properly. It will execute ls by itself though. I mean since it compiles and runs fine there's really no errors or anything generated. Does the arguments array I pass have to be of the EXACT size of the number of arguments? Or can it have blank entries as long as its ended by a NULL value?
You can have:
As long as it's big enough for the actual number of arguments you are using, it doesn't matter. It is passed as the address of the "vector" to execvp(), and execvp() will read the vector to find how many arguments there really are.Code:char *argv[100000] = { "ls" , "-l", NULL };
So do I get it right that you get "ls" to work, but if you do "ls -l" it does exactly the same as "ls"? In that case, my supposition is that argv[1] is not "-l", but NULL, and argv[0] contains the "-l" - since ls itself skips argv[0], it sees no arguments and just does normal "ls" instead of the long version you expect from "-l".
--
Mats
Compilers can produce warnings - make the compiler programmers happy: Use them!
Please don't PM me for help - and no, I don't do help over instant messengers.
Ok, after trying a couple things out I know what's wrong. If I make the array holding the arguments some generic size, say 20 (to account for any number of possible arguments) I run into problems, Even though I do null terminate it. But when I make the array a set size, say 3, and than test out writing "ls -l" it works. But the problem is now it no longer works for just "ls" or a command longer with more options. Is it supposed to matter if I pass the exec() command an array with empty values as long as it's null terminated (which doesn't seem to work)?
Last edited by John_L; 05-27-2008 at 02:56 PM.
