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I have a program which forks off other processes. The arguments to my program include the process name of the process to be forked, along with any arguments.

This means, when I make the call to exec(), I need to be able to handle however many arguments were supplied.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

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2 Answers 2

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The execv function takes a pointer to an array of arguments.

Just like in main, the last element in the array needs to be a null pointer.

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oh, perfect. that makes things nice and easy :).
@Blackbinary And, just like in main, the first (or 0th) element of the array is conventionally the program name (which need not be the same as the first argument to execv, which is the name of the file to execute).
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Alternately, execl() takes a variable number of arguments, with a NULL pointer at the end of the list. You should probably use execv(), however, as it's much cleaner; varargs in C can only be considered an ugly hack (take a look at (the files pointed to by) /usr/include/varargs.h sometime, if you dare!).

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The problem with varargs isn't that someone considers it to be an ugly hack, but that it can't be used to "handle however many arguments were supplied", since the number of arguments to a varargs function must be known at compile time. P.S. varargs.h is obsolete and not part of the C standard. stdarg.h is the correct header.

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