Gray Hat Hacking, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

C Programming Language

The C programming language was developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie from AT&T Bell Labs. The language was heavily used in Unix and is thereby ubiquitous. In fact, much of the staple networking programs and operating systems are based in C.

Basic C Language Constructs

Although each C program is unique, there are common structures that can be found in most programs. We’ll discuss these in the next few sections.

main()

All C programs contain a main structure (lowercase) that follows this format:

<optional return value type> main(<optional argument>) {
  <optional procedure statements or function calls>;
}

where both the return value type and arguments are optional. If you use command-line arguments for main(), use the format: ...