Trying to remember how to program in C

It's been a while since I have done C programming and I have a simple C program to write and am struggling. This is a Homework assignment. I need to write a program called faked_uname and it creates an executable and when you run

faked_uname --machine

is should print out the machine hardware name. I know how to access uname and get that info, I guess my real question is about compiling and running it. I'm confused about the faked_uname --machine. What does that access? does it call the function "machine" inside faked_uname?? I can't remember how to do this, and I know it's something simple.

Are you saying they assigned you something they didn't teach you anything about?

It isn't a C programming class, it's just a class that uses some basic C programming, but I am having troubles recalling how to do some basic things in C

How about a refresher tutorial

You are apparently doing this under either UNIX or Linux and not under Windows.

There is a shell command uname, whose man page can be read at http://linux.die.net/man/1/uname. One of its options is -m, also written as --machine. Read that page and familiarize yourself with the command. You should even open a shell and play with it for a bit.

Under UNIX/Linux, many shell commands have a corresponding C function -- shell commands tend to go on page 1 of the man pages and C functions on the other pages (2 or 3, usually). The equivalent C function is uname(), whose man page you can read at http://linux.die.net/man/2/uname. It used the utsname struct, which is described on that man page. One of the struct's fields is a char array (AKA "C-style string") called machine.

BTW, your system should have the man pages loaded on it, accessible in the shell via the man command. Or you can Google for it using the search words man page uname, substituting the command in question for "uname".

The main function's parameters are (int argc, char *argv[]). argv is an array of strings into which the command line invocation is loaded: argv[0] is the name of the program (possibly with the directory path prepended; printf it to find out) and argv[1] contains the first command-line parameter, arg[2] the second, etc. argc tells you how many strings are in argv. In the case of your example, uname --machine, argc would be 2, argv[0] would be something like "uname", and argv[1] would be "--machine".

In your assignment, since you already know that you will be calling uname, you could simply create a string onto which you concatenate argv[1] to create a string, eg "uname --machine" and then feed that to system() or popen(). Or you could call the uname() function and compare argv[1] to the possible option strings, identify which option it is, and output the appropriate string from the utsname struct.

Ok, It's starting to come back to me now. This is what I have so far, no testing yet though

You were doing at least intermediate level stuff six months ago with C, and you've forgotten how to do one of the most rudimentary tasks in C, comparing strings???

My chemistry teacher in high school called learning this way "the bathtub method".

That won't work. Hint: Use strcmp().

thanks, I realized that after the post about comparing strings . I only did a little C and then I have been working on Java and C# since.

Here is the updated code, in case anyone see's anymore simple errors.

Thanks!!

You forgot to return 0 for success. You should also add an else to return a non-zero for failure (eg, if they don't give you a valid option).

You should also check up front for argc not equal to 2, in which case I think uname will have some kind of default action. For that matter, do a few test runs of uname to see what it does, since you're supposed to mimic that. What does it do if you don't give it any options? Or if you give it more than one option?

Other than that, I would have declared the string literals as char* or just used them in the code as you did before. I normally only declare a string literal as a char array if I'm planning on modifying it later.

Other than that, how does it work when you run it? That's what I call the "Jello Test", as in "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."

It's seems to be functioning with the spec's given to us. Thank you guys for your help!