Question

please forgive me if this is a noob question, but i’m a beginner at C, learning only for a while. I tried to write a program that sums up two numbers (provided as params to the application). The code is like this:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main( int argc, char** argv)
{
   int a = atoi(argv[0]);
   int b = atoi(argv[1]);
   int sum = a+b;
   printf("%d", sum);
   return 0;
}

But I get incorrect results – huge numbers even for small inputs like 5 and 10. What is wrong here?

Answer 1

The first argument to the program is the name of the program itself. Try using the following instead.

int a = atoi(argv[1]); 
int b = atoi(argv[2]);