Warning: comparison with string literals results in unspecified behaviour

You can't compare strings with == in C. For C, strings are just (zero-terminated) arrays, so you need to use string functions to compare them. See the man page for strcmp() and strncmp().

If you want to compare a character you need to compare to a character, not a string. "a" is the string a, which occupies two bytes (the a and the terminating null byte), while the character a is represented by 'a' in C.

You want to use strcmp() == 0 to compare strings instead of a simple ==, which will just compare if the pointers are the same (which they won't be in this case).

args[i] is a pointer to a string (a pointer to an array of chars null terminated), as is "&" or "<".

The expression argc[i] == "&" checks if the two pointers are the same (point to the same memory location).

The expression strcmp( argc[i], "&") == 0 will check if the contents of the two strings are the same.

if (args[i] == "&")

Ok, let's disect what this does.

args is an array of pointers. So, here you are comparing args[i] (a pointer) to "&" (also a pointer). Well, the only way this will every be true is if somewhere you have args[i]="&" and even then, "&" is not guaranteed to point to the same place everywhere.

I believe what you are actually looking for is either strcmp to compare the entire string or your wanting to do if (*args[i] == '&') to compare the first character of the args[i] string to the & character

There is a distinction between 'a' and "a":

• 'a' means the value of the character a.
• "a" means the address of the memory location where the string "a" is stored (which will generally be in the data section of your program's memory space). At that memory location, you will have two bytes -- the character 'a' and the null terminator for the string.