11.6) An Example Of Arrays: Command Line Arguments

The main function of C and C++ programs can be declared with two parameters:

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
  ...
}

The parameter argc is a count of how many items were specified on the command line that ran the program, including the name of the program itself. The parameter argv is an array of C-style strings (pointers to char) representing the items from the command line.

Here's an example of a command line that runs an executable called analyze:

./analyze experiment.data results.txt

For this command line, argc will be 3, argv[0] will be "./analyze", argv[1] will be "experiment.data" and argv[2] will be "results.txt"

See args.cpp for a demonstration