How to read asterisk( * ) as an argument from the command line in C [duplicate]

Answer 1

Actually, it is the OS the one in charge of expanding the wildcards, so it is OS-specific (the C program receives just what the OS has interpreted).

That said, in most OS if you quote the wildcard it will not be expanded program_name 2 "*" 3. Even better, pass the whole expression as a single parameter (program_name "2 * 3")

Answer 2

This has nothing to do with C but with your shell. You need to quote * (and other shell special characters) if you want to be able to take them as argument. Otherwise the shell will to substiutions, in particular globbing.

So you need to call your program with:

./myprog 3 '*' 2

Answer 3

Your problem is not in your code. It is in the OS/shell. You see, the * in the command line expands to the directory contents so the arguments 2 * 3 expands to 2 dir1 dir2 file1, file2, etc...

I suggest you to use someting like "2*3" as an argument and something like sscanf(argv[1], "%d%c%d", &a, &command, &b);