Question

I’m writing a utility to count the lines in a given file via the Unix command line. Normally this would be dead simple for me, but apparently I’m having a major off night. The goal of this program is to take in an unknown number of files from the command line, read them into a buffer and check for the newline character. Sounds simple?

int size= 4096;

int main(int argc, char *argv[]){
  int fd, i, j, c, fileLines, totalLines;
  char *buf= (char *)malloc(size); //read buffer

  for (i=2; i<argc; i++){ //get first file

    fileLines=1;    

    if ((fd=open(argv[i], O_RDONLY))!= -1){ //open, read, print file count, close
        while ((c= read(fd, buf, size))!= 0){

            for (j=0; j<size; j++){
                if (buf[j] == '\n')
                    fileLines++;
            }
        }

    }
    printf("%s had %d lines of text\n", argv[i], fileLines);
    totalLines+= fileLines;
    close(fd);

  }

  printf("%d lines were counted overall\n", totalLines);    
  return 0;
}

I have two problems. The first is that the first printf statement is never executed outside of the debugger. The second thing is the totalLines printout should be roughly 175K lines, but the printed value is about 767 times larger.

I’m having trouble understanding this, because all the relevant variables have been declared out of scope from their modification, but that still doesn’t explain why the first print statemeent and line counter update is ignored outside of the debugger along with the abberant totalLines result

Any help is appreciated.

ANSWER

Two changes were suggested.
The first was to change j<size to j<c. While this was not the solution required, it follows good coding convention

The second was to change i=2 to i=1. The reason I had the original start variable was the way I started the debugger executable. In the gdb command line, I entered in run lc1 f1.txt to start the debugger. This resulted in the arglist having three variables, and I didn’t know that run f1.txt was perfectly suitable, since my professor introduced us to gdb by using the first example.

Answer 1

Consider: ./program file.txt

argv[0] is "program"
argv[1] is "file.txt"

which means your for loop starts from the wrong index, and if you are passing only 1 file through the cmd line your code will never enter in that loop! It should start at index 1:

for (i=1; i<argc; i++){

Do yourself a favor and initialize all variables when you declare them. Is the only way to ensure that there will be no garbage on those memory locations.