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Command Line Arguments

The document discusses how command line arguments allow passing data from the command line to the main function when a program is executed. Command line arguments are important for controlling programs from outside rather than hardcoding values inside. The argc parameter refers to the number of arguments passed, and argv is a pointer array pointing to each argument.

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12 views

Command Line Arguments

The document discusses how command line arguments allow passing data from the command line to the main function when a program is executed. Command line arguments are important for controlling programs from outside rather than hardcoding values inside. The argc parameter refers to the number of arguments passed, and argv is a pointer array pointing to each argument.

Uploaded by

manaskrishna.2004
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Command Line Arguments

Instead of invoking the input statement from inside the program, it is


possible to pass data from the command line to the main() function when the
program is executed. These values are called command line arguments.

Command line arguments are important for your program, especially when
you want to control your program from outside, instead of hard coding those
values inside the code.
Let us suppose you want to write a C program "hello.c" that prints a "hello" message
for a user.
Instead of reading the name from inside the program with scanf(), we wish to pass the
name from the command line as follows −

C:\users\user>hello Prakash

The string will be used as an argument to the main() function and then the "Hello Prakash" message
should be displayed.
argc and argv
To facilitate the main() function to accept arguments from the command line, you
should define two arguments in the main() function – argc and argv[].

argc refers to the number of arguments passed and argv[] is a pointer array that
points to each argument passed to the program.
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
...
...

return 0;
}
The argc argument should always be non-negative. The argv
argument is an array of character pointers to all the arguments,
argv[0] being the name of the program. After that till "argv [argc
- 1]", every element is a command-line argument.
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char* argv[])


{
printf("Program name is: %s" , argv[0]);

if (argc == 1)
printf("\nNo Extra Command Line Argument Passed "
"Other Than Program Name" );

if (argc >= 2) {
printf("\nNumber Of Arguments Passed: %d" , argc);
printf("\n----Following Are The Command Line "
"Arguments Passed----" );
for (int i = 0; i < argc; i++)
printf("\nargv[%d]: %s" , i, argv[i]);
}
return 0;
}
Terminal Input $ ./a.out First Second Third

Output
Program Name Is: ./a.out
Number Of Arguments Passed: 4
----Following Are The Command Line Arguments Passed----
argv[0]: ./a.out
argv[1]: First
argv[2]: Second
argv[3]: Third

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