How to: Display Command Line Arguments (C# Programming Guide)

Arguments provided to an executable on the command-line are accessible through an optional parameter to Main. The arguments are provided in the form of an array of strings. Each element of the array contains one argument. White-space between arguments is removed. For example, consider these command-line invocations of a fictitious executable:

Input on Command-line	Array of strings passed to Main
executable.exe a b c	"a" "b" "c"
executable.exe one two	"one" "two"
executable.exe "one two" three	"one two" "three"

Note

When you are running an application in Visual Studio, you can specify command-line arguments in the Debug Page, Project Designer.

Example

This example displays the command line arguments passed to a command-line application. The output shown is for the first entry in the table above.

class CommandLine
{ 
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        // The Length property provides the number of array elements
        System.Console.WriteLine("parameter count = {0}", args.Length);

        for (int i = 0; i < args.Length; i+)
        {
            System.Console.WriteLine("Arg[{0}] = [{1}]", i, args[i]);
        }
    }
}
/* Output (assumes 3 cmd line args): 
    parameter count = 3
    Arg[0] = [a]
    Arg[1] = [b]
    Arg[2] = [c]
*/

See Also

Tasks

How to: Access Command-Line Arguments Using foreach (C# Programming Guide)

Concepts

C# Programming Guide

Main() and Command-Line Arguments (C# Programming Guide)

Reference

Main() Return Values (C# Programming Guide)

Change History

Date	History	Reason
July 2008	Added note about the Debug page of the Project Designer.	Information enhancement.