can i know the physical address of command line arguments before runtime ?

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I want to find out the physical address of the command line arguments ( argv[i] (all of them if more than one )) before run time . To be specific , the compiler or OS might have pushed the command line values into the stack before calling main , and passing a pointer to main on execution which points to the argument array ( if my knowledge is ~~rite~~ right) so is it possible to know the physical address before runtime ?

Posted 4-Oct-12 14:53pm

archies50

Updated 4-Oct-12 15:01pm

Mohibur Rashid

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jibalt · Answer 1 · 2012-10-04T15:50:00

Well, they could be stored somewhere relative to the address of main, but not generally. main is in the code section, but the arguments are data. I suggest that you print out the addresses of argv and main and see if they maintain a relationship ... but even if so, it could change later.

I got email saying there was a comment but it isn't shown here. Anyway, you can simply do

printf("%ld\n", (char*)argv - (char*)main);

... this is not guaranteed to work by the C standard, but should work in normal implementations. However, I doubt that this will be a fixed value or that it would be useful even if it were.

jibalt · Answer 2 · 2012-10-04T14:56:00

Solution 1

No; as you were told on Stack Overflow, it can vary.

Posted 4-Oct-12 14:56pm

jibalt

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archies50 4-Oct-12 21:00pm

okay , lets say its not possible ! Now lets suppose we know the point of program entry , ie the memory address where main is called .Using this can we find out where are the comman line arguments stored ? like x address before the address of main.

Chuck O'Toole 5-Oct-12 1:27am

What possible use would it be to know this *before runtime*? If you application isn't running, why would you care? Plus, it is so easily discoverable at runtime from argv or CWnd::m_CmdLine so why bother trying to figure out the "unknowable" ahead of time. Windows, Linux, pick your favorite OS and/or hardware platform, they all can do it differently yet they all follow the standard of argv for telling you where they put the args. This just seems like a silly exercise.