Looking for critique. My first actual program with C.

https://gitlab.com/jmgibson1981/apt-sort

I have been working on this. Refactored the whole thing in the last couple days. Curious how it looks.

As a start: What does it do? What problem does it solve?

It started for an easy way to pull out -doc packages in apt. I could pipe a bunch of shell commands together but this does a pattern search and can regex to the beginning or end of the package name. Also returns just the package name without any of the other nonsense information when looking for something specific. One stop shop instead of piping a handful of commands with various flags to get only the relevant information.

$ aptsort --pattern ^test

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

testdisk
testdisk
testng
testrepository
testssl.sh
testu01-bin
testu01-bin
testu01-data
testu01-doc

$ aptsort --arch amd64 --pattern ^test

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

testdisk
testu01-bin

My first impressions are:

* The code is nicely formatted
* The program did not fall into the trap of buffer overruns
* Function prototypes are better placed in individual .h files corresponding to the .c files
* Bash is better suited for a program that mainly calls another program

You may want to look into a command-line option parsing library.
Ed

Thank you for directing me to option parsing. Replaced my own with getopt(). Much simpler and less lines. Grateful.

   int option = 0;
   int optcounter = 1;
   while ((option = getopt(argc, args, "ap")) != -1) {
      if (t1.bailout) {
         break;
      }
      switch (option)
      {
         case 'a':
            if (args[optcounter + 1]) {
               t1.architecture = strdup(args[optcounter + 1]);
               optcounter += 2;
            } else {
               init_regchecks_struct(&t1,
                                     true);
            }
            break;
         case 'p':
            if (args[optcounter +1]) {
               test_formatting(args[optcounter + 1], &t1);
               optcounter += 2;
            } else {
               init_regchecks_struct(&t1,
                                     true);
            }
            break;
         default:
            init_regchecks_struct(&t1,
                                  true);
            break;
      }

I'll switch the headers around. The only reason I didn't is because there are so few of them.