Question

What is the command line argument used in C to define the names of the files that will be used to read the data from and write the output information to?

Answer 1

Command line arguments in C programming are used to provide runtime input to a program, such as file names for reading data and writing output. These arguments are passed when executing the program and accessed via the main function's argv parameter.

Step-by-step explanation:

The command line arguments in C programming are used to pass input data to a program at runtime. Specifically, these arguments are accessible within a program through the main function's parameters, conventionally named argc for the argument count and argv for the argument vector (an array of character pointers pointing to the strings).

To read from and write to files specified at the command line, you would typically pass the file names as arguments when executing the program. For example:

./myprogram input.txt output.txt

Here, input.txt and output.txt are the names of the files passed as command line arguments to myprogram. In the program, you can access these filenames using argv[1] and argv[2], respectively, if you want to open and process them using file I/O functions such as fopen(), fread(), and fwrite().