cArduino | C Arduino for linux

The command looks messed up with respect to the parameters, although I don't see how exactly that triggers your specific error.

The beginning is OK. The path is properly quoted (double quotes, protected by backslashes from the C compiler). But why do you have slashes and backslashes mixed? In some online examples I saw that people use forward slashes in Windows paths (C:/whatever...) ; that seems to work and is easier than using double backslashes all the time (but it should not trigger your — or any — error).

So system("\"C:\\Program Files(x86)\\Arduino\\hardware\\tools\\avr/bin/avrdude\" ... should call the right executable. Why don't you try that on its own (without parameters) to see whether the error persists?

I suspect that \" - CC:\\Program Files(x86)\\ ... is not correct though. avrdude expects a parameter -C, not - C (note the badly placed spaces before and after the dash).

As an aside, it may not hurt to quote parameters that contain funny characters like colons which may have special meanings.

The general advice for this kind of trouble:

• Work in and with paths that do not contain spaces, brackets, or other non-identifier characters. If you don't want to change the avrdude installation path you can use the DOS subst command to create a drive whose root is C:\Program Files(x86) or even C:\Program Files(x86)\Arduino\hardware\tools\avr\bin, e.g. subst H: "C:\Program Files(x86)\Arduino\hardware\tools\avr\bin". The command would then be H:/avrdude :-).
• If confronted with a bug you don't understand, simplify the problem radically until a toy version works; then add complexity bit by bit until you encounter the error; that should make it easier to recognize what triggered it.

Edit: I'm not sure this example is valid because I used the msys2 development environment and ran the example in a bash shell; I'm not even sure cmd is called as the system shell by the syste call!

In order to check the system call semantics I wrote the following minimal example (which uses mixed slashes/backslashes as a test). The current directory has a sub directory called "some dir" containing a minimal program showargs which simply writes its command line parameters to stdout:

I would recommend to test loopback to make sure the serial communication channel is intact. I am presuming that the board and port is selected properly.

Without the busy-loop, the program will immediately return 0, and end. While it is in the loop, doing nothing, it can be interrupted by an Interrupt Service Routine.