Hello,

I have couple of questions:

1.) I am trying to see the environment variables in my system using global variable environ and the command line argument char * envp[].

Following is my code snippet:
-------------------------------------------------

extern char* environ[];

int main(int argc, char* argv[], char *envp[])
{
int i=0, j=0;
while(environ[i])
{
printf("%s\n", environ[i]);
i++;
}
while(envp[j])
{
printf("%s\n", envp[j]);
j++;
}
}
-------------------------------------------------

The first while loop does not give proper results.
But when I changed the declaration of global variable to "extern char ** environ"it gave proper results.

can some one clarify me this as why is this happening. As per my understanding char* environ[] and char** environ are same. And also the second loop worked fine though I declared envp as char * envp[].



2.) When I ran the above program with out passing any command line arguments, it still worked and gave proper results with loop 2, the envp argument. How come? I didnt pass this argument, how could it still pull in the environment variables to envp? And the main thing, if I would like to pass the command line arguments I would I do that?

Thanks a lot in advance.

1. This part is tricky. IMO when you add extern char* environ[] you redefine it, in fact. On the other hand, if you use exactly the same extern as in unistd.h, it is just a repeat. In fact, I wouldn't redefine environ (any way), just compile with -D_GNU_SOURCE (if you do not have other reasons to leave it off).

If you want to learn more about this problem, read about weak symbols and then move to this discussion: http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2007-07/msg00304.html (but it's rather complicated).

2. This one is simple You don't reset i to 0 after the first loop.

i actually can't say about the problem...i'll figure it out and let you know....

the thing is whenever you write programs, let it be any language, follow proper indentation and proper commenting.
it helps oyhers to grasp your program quickly.







Enjoy programming...

Hi Mara,

Thanks for your response and I understood what I was doing regarding first loop..thanks.

Regarding the second loop, my question was different...when I ran the code I was running one loop at a time and when I posted it I forgot to initialize i to 0... my bad . Anyways I edited the code I posted. But my question was, after compiling the code and if I run it with out passing the command line arguments like ./a.out at the prompt, envp is still available inside the code. I was assuming it to complain that envp unkown variable when I run it with out passing the arguments.

Also if I need to pass command line arguments when running a program, how would I do it?

Thanks.

Hi

Thanks for the suggestion ..but I did maintain the indentation but when I post the code it is getting corrupted and all spaces are being removed. How do I do that.

Thanks

As you've used quote tags above, use the word 'code' in tags instead, in the exact same way.
BTW, envp is supplied as part of the compiler http://www.cs.ui.ac.id/WebKuliah/IKI...nt_Access.html