CSCI 1200 - Fall 2006
Computer Science II

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Command Line Arguments

In order for your program to receive arguments from the command line, you will make use of the optional arguments to the main function. Here is the prototype:

  int main(int argc, char* argv[])

The parameter argc contains the number of strings on the command line (including the executable name). And the array argv stores those c-style strings. You can access the executable name with argv[0] and the arguments with argv[1], argv[2], etc.

Reading From & Writing To Files

std::cin & std::cout are used to read data from and write data to the "console". Often we would rather read data from a file and/or write the output to a file. We can do this using the fstream library:

  #include <fstream>

Here's an example fragment of code that attempts to open an input file stream for a file name specified on the command line:

  std::ifstream in_str(argv[1]);

It is good coding practice to verify that the input stream was successfully opened:

  if (!in_str) {
    std::cerr << "Can't open " << argv[1] << " to read.\n";
    exit(1);
  }

Likewise here's how to open a stream for output:

  std::ofstream out_str(argv[2]);
  if (!out_str) {
    std::cerr << "Can't open " << argv[2] << " to write.\n";
    exit(1);
  }

Once the streams are created, you can use in_str & out_str just like you use std::cin & std::cout.

Redirecting Input & Output

What if you have an interactive program that uses std::cin & std::cout to read from and write to the "console", but you'd like to take the input from a file and you'd rather not rewrite the program to use the input & output streams described above. For example if you're debugging & testing an interactive program you'd rather not repeatedly type in the same test cases. Asking the executable to read from a file instead of the console and/or write to a file instead of the console is called file redirection.

With Cygwin/Linux/FreeBSD/UNIX, at the command prompt simply type:

   program.exe < input.txt > output.txt

With Visual Studio:

Create input.txt file that contains input which you would otherwise type during program's execution.
Move the file into your project's directory (where the project files are).
Go to Project->Properties, select 'Debugging' and in 'Command arguments' enter: < input.txt > output.txt
The 'Working directory' is by default the directory of your project files, so you don't need to change it. Warning: There is a file re-direction bug in Visual Studio .NET. The program does not change to the "working directory" before command line I/O takes place (< input.txt > output.txt). One workaround is to specify the full path of these files on your computer, e.g., c:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\cs2\hw\hw4\input.txt. Except... you can't have spaces in your file name. So you should put the files in a place with no spaces, like c:\input.txt.
< c:\input.txt > c:\output.txt
When you run your program from within Visual Studio, the input from the file input.txt will be redirected to your executable and the output text will be written to output.txt.

Note: Once you've sent your output to a file, you can quickly compare it to another file (the provided sample output) using the UNIX utility diff (available on Cygwin):

  diff my_output.txt sample_output.txt

WinDiff is another option for Windows users. Please see a TA or the instructor in office hours if you have a question about these programs.