The command line is the string that a user types into a console window to start a program. For example, if a program is started with the command

program1 argmnt1 argmnt2 argmnt3

then the command line arguments are argmnt1, argmnt2 and argmnt3. These strings are passed to the main function in the char* argv[] parameter, as arrays of characters. Therefore, they should be converted to C++ strings, before using them.

argv[0] always contains the name of the program, program1, and argv[1] would contain argmnt1, etc.