Thread: Program help

I am a newbie and trying to write a program that shifts letters in a circular fashion 5 times (ie: first line ABCDE, second line EABCD, third line DEABC, etc) using the following function definition:

void shift(char *p1, char *p2, char *p3, char *p4, char *p5)

First a question. What does the char *p1, etc represent?

I know the function is calling a char but I don't understand what the '*' in from of the p1 signifies.

Thanks for any help.

Here's the basic code without the functon:

Code:

#include <stdio.h>

void shift(char *p1, char *p2, char *p3, char *p4, char *p5);

char main(void)
{
  char c1='A',c2='B',c3='C',c4='D',c5='E';
  int cnt=0;
  printf("%c%c%c%c%c\n",c1,c2,c3,c4,c5); /*prints ABCDE*/
  if(cnt<=5){
	shift(&c1,&c2,&c3,&c4,&c5);
	printf("%c%c%c%c%c\n",c1,c2,c3,c4,c5); /*prints each  
                line 5 times shifting the characters*/
                cnt++;
	}
  else
  return (0);
}
void shift(char *p1, char *p2, char *p3, char *p4,char *p5)
{
?????????Here's where I am stuck
}

first of all you declared main as char, main returns int,
so it should be int main() , then we will talk

the pointer let you pass a varaible to the function, in a way
that let you modify the original value, without having to copy
the amount and return it by the function.

I don't know why I had char main() instead of int main(). I did a lot of cut and pasting in the compiler so it must have gotten missed while I was trying to figure out what to do in early versions of the code. I had declared some characters after #include <stdio.h> in the first versions I messed with. That's probaly where it came from.

I'll review what had been posted in response and see if I can figure out what is going on.