Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!bellcore!texbell!wuarchive!wugate!uunet!mcvax!piring.cwi.nl!guido
From: guido@piring.cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Contents of argv[0]
Keywords: start-up code, argv specifications
Message-ID: <8337@boring.cwi.nl>
Date: 17 Aug 89 13:07:49 GMT
References: <9002@attctc.Dallas.TX.US> <10743@smoke.BRL.MIL> <19112@mimsy.UUCP>
Sender: news@cwi.nl
Lines: 22

chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:

>In article <10743@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>same answer: print the whole thing.  The only bad effect is that
>occasionally someone will see more detail than needed.

Well, there's esthetics... I don't really like usage messages like this:

usage: /tmp_mnt/ober/ufs1/amoeba/guido/bin/dpv [-d] [-f funnytab] [+page] ditroff-output-file

Which is why I strip initial path components if I find them.  (The C code
I use happens to use a default if there is no argv[0], it is a null
pointer or an empty string, or ends in a slash, which is probably not a
big loss.  My shell scripts use `basename $0`.)

I also seem to remember that some shells (csh?) prefix argv[0] with the
directory in $PATH where the command was found, and some don't.

--
Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam
guido@cwi.nl or mcvax!guido or guido%cwi.nl@uunet.uu.net
"Repo man has all night, every night."