CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++cforkxterm
Einheri
Einheri

Reputation: 985

Spawning a new terminal and opening vim

What I'm trying to achieve is to open a new terminal from a C/C++ program and run vim. I'm doing this by forking and execing "xterm -e vim [fname]". Try as I might, I can't seem to get xterm to understand what it is I want it to do.

Below is the relevant code segment:

    int pid = fork();
    if (pid){
        //parent
        int retstat;
        waitpid (pid, &retstat, 0);
    }else{
        //child
        
        char* ifname_cchararr = (char*)malloc(ifname.length() + 1);
        strcpy (ifname_cchararr, ifname.c_str());
        char* const argv[4] = {"-e", "vim", ifname_cchararr, NULL};
       // std::cout << ifname_cchararr<<std::endl;
        execvp ("xterm", argv);
    }

Running the program results in xterm complaining:

-e : Explicit shell already was /usr/bin/vim

-e : bad command line option "testfile"

I get the feeling I've messed up argc somehow, but I'm confused, because running the following in an xterm window:

xterm -e vim testfile

works perfectly fine.

Please enlighten me!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 606

Answers (1)

tkausl
tkausl

Reputation: 14269

You forgot to add xterm as first argument in argv. It may seems a bit weird, that you have to add the program-name to argv, since you already tell execvp which program you're calling, but thats how it is. For more information to why, see this recently asked question on Unix & Linux: Why does argv include the program name

Upvotes: 1

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