Thread: Command Line arguments in C

Hello,

I wrote a program in C that does the following: user enters any number of arguments in command line separated by space(single or multiple) and the program outputs http://www.[user arguments].com. (Trying to emulate what mozilla browser does. enter web address and press cntrl+enter, it will add webaddress.com for you).

My program achieves somewhat same except one thing. It removes the spaces between arguments. I would like to echo the command line arguments. How can I do that? How can I read the spaces between two arguments? I know you can add double quote to read them as a one argument but I don't want do that.

Thank you!

If they enter more than one argument, then your program will get more than one argument (in argv[1], argv[2], etc.) argc tells you how many there are.

You can't. The operating system parses it and unless the OS has some interface to retrieve it (I think windows does), it's not possible to find out. The user would have to be smart enough to put it in quotes to show the OS it's only one argument; as it is in this case.
Eg. ./program "some website"

You could string all the arguments together and put a single space in between them. That will work, unless a user types two spaces after each other or a tab in stead of a space.

thanks! i was thinking along that line. Just curious, how does echo command in MS-DOS do it? Did some googling but didn't find much.

Originally Posted by hexabina

thanks! i was thinking along that line. Just curious, how does echo command in MS-DOS do it? Did some googling but didn't find much.

It either can't (ie. doing it the same as I suggested, adding one space between each argument), or it's not a program but part of the shell. In Linux it's the former, in Windows I don't know. Or it uses some windows api I don't know.