how do run a cprogram on shutdown or restart

[krabz01]

how do run a cprogram on shutdown or restart

[Narue]

That's platform specific. You need to tell your OS to run that program on boot. What OS are you using?

[krabz01]

linux

[Narue]

If you don't care about run levels, placing a symbolic link to your executable in /etc/rc.d/rc.local (or /etc/rc.local depending on your distro) should do it.

[kings_mitra]

Edit the /etc/rc.d/rc.local file and add a line to run the program with the actual path like :
/home/sam/program (where program is the binary name)
Otherwise, you can copy the binary to the /usr/bin directory (or a sym link will also do) and add only the executable name instead of the actual path.

But I doubt whether it will run before user login or after. Check it.

[\007]

Here's a copy of my /etc/rc.local.shutdown

#!/bin/bash
#
# /etc/rc.local.shutdown: Local shutdown script.
#

#empty trash
/usr/bin/etrash

#remove /tmp files
rm -rf /tmp/*

You may also want to look into setting up Cron jobs.