spawn() Ignores arg0 with MS-DOS 3.0 and Later

Last reviewed: July 17, 1997
Article ID: Q51768

5.10 6.00 6.00a 6.00ax 7.00 | 1.00 1.50 | 1.00

MS-DOS                      | WINDOWS   | WINDOWS NT

kbprg

The information in this article applies to:

The C Run-time (CRT), included with:

    - Microsoft C for MS-DOS, versions 5.1, 6.0, 6.0a, and 6.0ax
    - Microsoft C/C++ for MS-DOS, version 7.0
    - Microsoft Visual C++ for Windows, versions 1.0 and 1.5
    - Microsoft Visual C++ 32-bit Edition, version 1.0

Under MS-DOS versions 3.0 and later, the first argument (arg0) is used to hold the path and name of the program. The third parameter in a spawn command is arg0. Regardless of what you specify arg0 to be, MS-DOS passes the path and name of the program to the child function. Under MS-DOS 2.x, arg0 is not defined.

For Windows NT and OS/2 native applications, this is not the case; arg0 is passed as specified with the spawn command.

Additional reference words: kbinf 5.10 6.00 6.00a 6.00ax 7.00 1.00 1.50
KBCategory: kbprg
KBSubcategory: CRTIss
Keywords : kb16bitonly

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Last reviewed: July 17, 1997
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