[c] C - reading command line parameters

I have made little program for computing pi (p) as an integral. Now I am facing a question how to extend it to compute an integral, which will be given as an extra parameter when starting an application. How do I deal with such a parameter in a program?

Parsing command line arguments in a primitive way as explained in the above answers is reasonable as long as the number of parameters that you need to deal with is not too much.

I strongly suggest you to use an industrial strength library for handling the command line arguments.

This will make your code more professional.

Such a library for C++ is available in the following website. I have used this library in many of my projects, hence I can confidently say that this one of the easiest yet useful library for command line argument parsing. Besides, since it is just a template library, it is easier to import into your project. http://tclap.sourceforge.net/

A similar library is available for C as well. http://argtable.sourceforge.net/

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

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  int i, parameter = 0;
  if (argc >= 2) {
    /* there is 1 parameter (or more) in the command line used */
    /* argv[0] may point to the program name */
    /* argv[1] points to the 1st parameter */
    /* argv[argc] is NULL */
    parameter = atoi(argv[1]); /* better to use strtol */
    if (parameter > 0) {
      for (i = 0; i < parameter; i++) printf("%d ", i);
    } else {
      fprintf(stderr, "Please use a positive integer.\n");
    }
  }
  return 0;
}

There's also a C standard built-in library to get command line arguments: getopt

You can check it on Wikipedia or in Argument-parsing helpers for C/Unix.