Noob question of the week for you C gurus: I need to write a wrapper
function around the mvprintw function, like so:

int smvprintw( ? )
{
// Do various checks/modifications on the first two arguments (int y,
int x) first,
// and then
return mvprintw ( ? );
}

How should I write the args for smvprintw so that I can pass all the
data correctly to mvprintw, and also do my checks on the first two args (for example, to modify them)? I'm confused by the prototype of mvprintw:

This is mvprintw as listed in the man pages:
int mvprintw(int y, int x, const char *fmt, ...);

And this is how I saw it in ncurses.h:
extern NCURSES_EXPORT(int) mvprintw (int,int, const char *,...)

I believe the "..." refers to the unknown number of items after const char * fmt. Will it suffice to do something like "int smvprintw(int y, int x, const char * fmt, void * etc)" and then "mvprintw(y, x, fmt, etc)" inside the function?

look man if you want to change the variables and have the effect in the calling function then send pointers to them
like that
to call the function :
in your function :
any other questions??

Look at "man va_arg" for information on how to use ... as function arguments.

But in order to pass a variable number of arguments in a function that takes a variable number of arguments, you need to find a corresponding function that takes a va_list parameter. Those functions are usually prefixed with a v, so for e.g. printf there's a vprintf. But there is a limitation on this. Functions with a variable number of arguments can't know how many arguments are called, so for example printf does this by checking the format string. (What I'm saying is that safe modification of the parameters will be tricky.)