Passing arguments in assembly

[priller]

I'm learning assembly on linux and I'm trying to pass an argument from the command line with a program name.

I can get the agrument off the stack and into a regitster with

movl 8(%esp),%edi

but when i try and compare it with something held in another register that is the fail the flags e register isn't set even though both registers are the same.

Any reason why?

[Unit]

what instruction are you using to compare? Also, make sure that you are comparing the actual values rather than the addresses that point to similar looking values. A small snippet of code illustrating the problem would be helpful.