Command line argument parsing issues?

Ok I'm on a Windows machine and I'm writing a simple tool to dump and touch ttf files. It's almost done except that the command line parser is giving nightmares.

My question is that how do I stop the shell from automatically converting wildcards in arguments to directory listings? (I first flatten all arguments to a single string before parsing)

I use gcc 3.4.2 (mingw)

I cant give you the parse code from the ttf tool (it's 500+ lines and full of dependencies) but here's a short code that demonstrates the issue:

Code:

---

/* shelltest.c */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(int argc,char *argv[]) {
        int i=argc;
        char **args=argv;

        printf("argc=%i\n",argc);

        while(i--) printf("%s ",*args++);

        return 0;
}

---

The directory listing is:

Code:

---

Directory of D:\touch\test

01/01/2002  05:46 AM    <DIR>          .
01/01/2002  05:46 AM    <DIR>          ..
01/01/2002  05:46 AM              197 shelltest.c
01/01/2002  05:46 AM            15,663 shelltest.exe
01/01/2002  05:47 AM                9 some.txt
              3 File(s)        15,869 bytes

---

Example usage:

Code:

---

shelltest *

---

gives

Code:

---

argc=4
shelltest shelltest.c shelltest.exe some.txt

---

How do I get the '*' as it is in the arguments?

Well you do what you did when you posted, you put the * in either single or double quotes.

Wildcard expansion (called globbing) is a function of the shell you use to invoke the program, not the program itself.

So if you want a "*" to be itself, you usually have to quote it in some way.

Yes but it's a program for release, it has to be able to handle the situation when the user types in * (without quotes) as an argument without ..........ing up big time. Is there any way to get the * as it is without putting it in quotes?

On Windows the program itself is responsible for wildcard expansion rather than the shell. If you want to make MinGW stop wildcard expansion, you can set the following global variable. I'm pretty sure it is for MinGW only.

Code:

---

int _CRT_glob = 0;

---

Thanks this works! and how do i get the quotation marks as they are in my args. (as i said i find it too complicated to parse directly without flattening.)

I flatten all args except the program name (argv[0]) to a single string. So ex:

Code:

---

evilfont -i "some font.ttf" --scale 1.5 -o new.ttf

---

How do I get the contents of flattened string exactly as:

Code:

---

-i "some font.ttf" --scale 1.5 -o new.ttf

---

Wait, I think I work around this issue by actually double-quoting the arg after -i and -o in the flattener. There was another option --loadGlyph char=number filename, I can work around it by changing the argument order to --loadGlyph filename char=number

But still I'd like to know some way of getting the quotes as they are.

Yep that trick works for the -i and -o options, I'll change the --loadGlyph option later.

Thanks for your help c99tutorial and Salem!