Hey there guys, the question is actually about stack overflows in C. I have an assigment that I can not get done for the life of me, i've looked at everything in the gdb and I just cant figure it.

The question is the following:

int i,n;

void confused()
{
    printf("who called me");
    exit(0);
}

void shell_call(char *c)
{
    printf(" ***Now calling \"%s\" shell command *** \n",c);
    system(c);
    exit(0);
}

void victim_func()
{
    int a[4];
    printf("[8]:%x\n", &a[8]);
    printf("Enter n: "); scanf("%d",&n);
    printf("Enter %d HEX Values \n",n);
    for(i=0;i<n;i++) scanf("%x",&a[i]);
    printf("Done reading junk numbers\n");
}

int main()
{
    printf("ls=736c --- ps = 7370 --- cal = 6c6163\n");
    printf("location of confused %x \n", confused);
    printf("location of shell_call %x \n", shell_call);
    victim_func();
    printf("Done, thank you\n");

}

Ok, so I managed to get the first question correctly, which is to arbitrarily call one of the two functions not explicitly called in the main path. By the way, this has to be done while running the program without any modifications. I did this by running the program, setting N to 7, which gets me to the Function Pointer of the victim_func frame, I write a[7] with the memory address of confused or shell_call, and it works. (I have a 64 bit machine, thats why I have to get it to 7, since the EBI pointer is 2 ints wide, instead of 1) My question is the following, how could I control which argument gets passed to the shell_code funcion? ie. how do i write a string to char* c. The whole point is executing unix commands like "ps" etc, by running only the program.

I figured writing the EBI pointer with the hex representation of "ps" and setting the arg list of shell_call to that, but that didn't work. I also tried inputing argsv arguments and setting the arg list of shell_call to the arg_list of main, but didnt work either.

I think the second version should work, but i believe im not setting the arg list of the new stack frame correctly ( I did it by writing a[8] to 0, since its the first part of the functin pointer, and writing a[9]=736c and a[10]=0000, but its probably not right since those are the parameters of victim_func. So how do i access the parameters of shell_call?