String outputting Gibberish

Question

in my C script my input is printing out gibberish and im not sure why

heres more or less what i have on it

int main (int arg, char argv[])
{
    printf(argv);
}

this prints out giberish?

Answer 1

The following should yield the results you are looking for

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    // Check if there is at least 2 arguments. First argument is the executable name.
    if(argc > 1)
    {
        // Print out a string, followed by a new-line character.
        printf("%s\n", argv[1]);
    }
    // Exit successfully
    return 0;
}

Edit: After looking at your code here and some of the things I recommend to change:

The signature of your main function to int main(int argc, char **argv). Here argc is the argument count, and argv are the argument values. argv is a double-pointer. If we consider char* to be a string (sequence of characters in memory terminated by a null-character, or 0), then argv is a pointer to argc-many strings.

Secondly, to check the first program argument, consider making sure that there is in-fact an argument there. if(argc > 1) will make sure there is at least 1 argument to the program (the 0-index argument to a program is the executable path).

When you want to actually check the value of the first argument, de-reference argv to get a "string" with argv[1] //The first argument. Then you can de-reference this string to get the first character

if ( *(argv[1]) == 'f' )
{
    ....
}

If you want to check for a full string, rather than just a single character, consider using a function such as strcmp defined in <string.h>.