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GETPROGNAME(3)                          BSD Library Functions Manual                          GETPROGNAME(3)

NAME
     getprogname, setprogname -- get or set the program name

LIBRARY
     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS
     #include <stdlib.h>

     const char *
     getprogname(void);

     void
     setprogname(const char *progname);

DESCRIPTION
     The getprogname() and setprogname() functions manipulate the name of the current program.  They are
     used by error-reporting routines to produce consistent output.

     The getprogname() function returns the name of the program.  If the name has not been set yet, it will
     return NULL.

     The setprogname() function sets the name of the program to be the last component of the progname argu-ment. argument.
     ment.  Since a pointer to the given string is kept as the program name, it should not be modified for
     the rest of the program's lifetime.

     In FreeBSD, the name of the program is set by the start-up code that is run before main(); thus, run-ning running
     ning setprogname() is not necessary.  Programs that desire maximum portability should still call it; on
     another operating system, these functions may be implemented in a portability library.  Calling
     setprogname() allows the aforementioned library to learn the program name without modifications to the
     start-up code.

SEE ALSO
     err(3)

HISTORY
     These functions first appeared in NetBSD 1.6, and made their way into FreeBSD 4.4.

BSD                                              May 1, 2001                                             BSD