extern ** environ...

[Rahul]

Hi Everyone,

I once had a look at a code having the following declaration,

extern ** environ or extern char ** environ...

I lost the code and i'm wondering what is the exact need of this? Does
anyone have any idea on this?

Thanks in advance!!!

 

[James Kanze]

I once had a look at a code having the following declaration,

extern ** environ or extern char ** environ...

I lost the code and i'm wondering what is the exact need of
this? Does anyone have any idea on this?

It should be "extern char** environ". And it is a Unixism;
according to Posix, it should be declared in <unistd.h>. See
http://www.unix.org/single_unix_specification/ for more
information (search for environ). And of course, don't use it
in portable code, although I wouldn't be too surprised if
Windows supported it as well. (In practice, it is exceedingly
rare to need to access it directly in Unix as well. I may have
done so once, in twenty years of Unix programming, and that was
implementing the getenv() function.)