Passing arguments to C programs

[Joseph S. D. Yao]

In article <983 at brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn at brl.ARPA writes:
>The requirements for a hosted C environment are given in section
>B.1.2.2 of the X3J11 draft standard.  ...
>     ... there is a strong implication that the environment must
>be able to supply [args] to a C program at start-up.  This would
>not be required of a freestanding environment C implementation,
>of course.

I don't see why "of course."  Using the System V stand-alone shell,
I've gotten unix to happily accept command-line arguments specifying
root, initial swap, dump, and pipe devices and other parameters.
Perhaps "of course" applies just to the idea that it's not required
of less fortunate systems?

Note that accepting arguments is possible to most stand-alone programs
on System V even without the stand-alone shell.  They just prompt for
their args and read them in from the keyboard.
-- 

	Joe Yao		hadron!jsdy at seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}