> When I first came across (argc, argv) a long long time ago I was befuddled by the choice of having argv[0] be something vaguely related to your binary, maybe

> When I first came across (argc, argv) a long long time ago I was befuddled by the choice of having argv[0] be something vaguely related to your binary, maybe the path to it. I’ve seen a Unix (¿maybe HP-UX?) that seemed to construct the argv strings by taking a copy of the entire command line and writing zero bytes at the end of each argument. I don’t think that’s too weird. Why do multiple allocations to make room for the strings if you know a reasonably tight upper limit to the number of bytes you need to store all of them? (Reasonably tight because the command line _could_ contain consecutive spaces and because of backspaces and quotes around arguments) On that OS, argv* strings also were writable, so programs could even replace those zeroes by spaces to, in many cases (I don’t remember how that worked with quoted arguments), get back the command line used to launch the program: for(i=1; i<argc; ++i) argv[i][-1] = ‘ ‘; printf(“%s\n”, argv[0]); (Yes, on top of, AFAIK, not being guaranteed to work by any standard, that’s undefined behavior in C, but it did work on that OS) So, I guess passing something resembling the executable’s name was something they got for free. It might even originally have been a bug, for all I know.