D. J. Bernstein
TCP/IP
ucspi-tcp

The argv0 program

argv0 runs a program with a specified 0th argument.

Interface

     argv0 realname zero args
realname is one argument. zero is one argument. args is any number of arguments.

argv0 runs the program stored as realname on disk, with zero as the 0th argument (rather than realname) and args as the remaining arguments.

Applications

Some programs pay special attention to the 0th argument. argv0 makes these programs usable from shell scripts.

For example,

     argv0 /bin/csh -csh
runs /bin/csh with a 0th argument of -csh. /bin/csh will think it is a login shell and behave accordingly.

As another example, the command

     tcpserver 0 ftp argv0 tcpd ftpd -l -A
has a similar effect to the line
     ftp stream tcp nowait root tcpd ftpd -l -A
in /etc/inetd.conf. The tcpd program is run with 0th argument ftpd and remaining arguments -l -A. Note that tcpd can and should be replaced by the -x option of tcpserver:
     tcpserver -x ftp.tcp 0 ftp ftpd -l -A