Hello Sebastian,
On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 5:11 PM, Sebastian Geiger <sbastig@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> I would like to suggest an improvement on the execve man-page (Page
> Version 3.27). In the description of the execve system call I would
> suggest to add a reminder that the argv arrays need to have put the
> programm name as its first argument.
>
> For the unexperienced it is easy to write something as such:
>
> char* program = "/usr/bin/ls";
> char* file = "-lah";
> char* argv[] = {file, NULL}; //should be {program, file, NULL}
> char* envp[] = {NULL};
> execve(eog, argv, envp);
>
> For the experienced programmers this is probably obvious, yet for those
> more unexperienced it would be a useful hint if the man-page said
> something like:
>
> "Remember the first argument in the argv array should be the path to the
> programm that is about to be executed and your custom arguments should
> start from the second position."
Thanks for the report. The exec(3) page already contains text along
the lines you suggest, and of course execve(2) should also. For
man-pages-3.33, I applied the patch below.
Cheers,
Michael
--- a/man2/execve.2
+++ b/man2/execve.2
@@ -58,6 +58,8 @@ starting with a line of the form:
For details of the latter case, see "Interpreter scripts" below.
\fIargv\fP is an array of argument strings passed to the new program.
+By convention, the first of these strings should contain the filename
+associated with the file being executed.
\fIenvp\fP is an array of strings, conventionally of the form
\fBkey=value\fP, which are passed as environment to the new program.
Both \fIargv\fP and \fIenvp\fP must be terminated by a null pointer.
--
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Author of "The Linux Programming Interface"; http://man7.org/tlpi/
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