Question

I have coded a little app that does something like the following:

sprintf(command, "......sending this string to system......{} \;"
printf("%s\n",command);
system(command);
break;

The problem is that not the whole string is sent to system, everything appears in my shell apart from the ‘\’ which doesn’t for some reason? I am sure its a silly mistake really, I am a novice.
Thank you

Answer 1

The \ is an escape character (you just used it to print a newline using \n), so if you want to print a literal backslash, you need to use \\:

sprintf(command, "......sending this string to system......{} \\;"
//                                                            ^^
//                                                      take note here