using command line arguments, which are not single chars

Dear forum

I would like to read parameters from the command line. I would like to give a parameter that controls the overall mode of the program, valid modes are “count”, “head”, “stat” and “CSV”. For user convenience I would like to allow the use of single letter short forms “c”, “h”, “s” and the lower case form “csv”.

I tried the code below, but it seems that argv[1] is not really a string, even though printf() seems to accept it as a string argument.

Can any one please tell how I get the string information in argv[1] into a string variable that will allow me to something like the code below.

I did look in the FAQ, but it only shows printf() and single char (like argv[1][1] == '-') usage.

Best Regards
Moses

Code:

---

  if (argv[1]=="c" || argv[1]=="count") {
      printf( " mode: count\n" );
  }
  else {
      if (argv[1]=="h" || argv[1]=="head") {
        printf(" mode: head\n");
      }
      else {
        if (argv[1]=="s" || argv[1]=="stat") {
            printf(" mode: stat\n");
        }
        else {
            if (argv[1]=="csv" || argv[1]=="CSV") {
              printf(" mode: CSV\n");
            }
            else {
              printf(" Unknown mode: %s\n",argv[1]);
            }
        }
      }
  }

---

You cannot compare zero terminated strings with operator == ( that would just compare the addresss ).
Use strcmp()

Kurt

Thanks ... Now it looks like below, and works perfect:

Code:

---

  strcpy(cmd,argv[1]); // copy to string 'short name' variable
  for (i=0; cmd[i]; i++)
    cmd[i] = tolower(cmd[i]); // make it all lower case

  if (strcmp(cmd,"c")==0 || strcmp(cmd,"count")==0) {
          printf( " mode: Count\n" );
  }
  else {
          if (strcmp(cmd,"h")==0 || strcmp(cmd,"head")==0) {
                  printf(" mode: Head\n");
          }
          else {
                  if (strcmp(cmd,"s")==0 || strcmp(cmd,"stat")==0) {
                          printf(" mode: Stat\n");
                  }
                  else {
                          if (strcmp(cmd,"csv")==0) {
                                  printf(" mode: CSV\n");
                          }
                          else {
                                  printf(" Unknown mode: %s\n",cmd);
                          }
                  }
          }
  }

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