Well, if you really want to confound things you could write your own __start which is typically the entry point called by the kernel, which in turn calls `main(

Well, if you really want to confound things you could write your own __start which is typically the entry point called by the kernel, which in turn calls `main()`. But actually that's just by convention: C (and C++) programs drop `__start` into the binary and then tell the linker to mark the binary (mostly an ELF file these days, thank goodness) to indicate that the entry point is the symbol `__start`. There can be different versions depending on how many arguments to `main()` are requested, or it can simply pass all three and let the function body ignore the unwanted ones. If you really want to confuse the TA, write the following program: #include <stdio.h> void foo(); int main() { printf ("I'm in main\n"); foo(); printf ("I'm still in main\n"); } void foo() { printf ("I'm in foo!\n"); } Then tell the linker to mark `foo` as your entry point. You could do this from the command line or even a custom linker script. Of course depending on what your OS needs from `__start` you may have to do some extra setup, sorry. But this might work on Linux. I've actually been thinking of modifying gcc's `__start` to pass the arguments and env vars as a span (well, the function __start calls that calls `main()`.)