How to stop C console application from exiting immediately

Question

Lately  I ve been trying to learn C   from this website  Unfortunately whenever I try to run one of the code samples  I see that program open for about a half second and then immediately close  Is there a way to stop the program from closing immediately so that I can see the fruits of my effort

User · Answer

I usually just put a breakpoint on main   s closing curly brace   When the end of the program is reached by whatever means the breakpoint will hit and you can ALT-Tab to the console window to view the output

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You could also stick   while true          or  for             at the end

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Edit   As Charles Bailey rightly points out in a comment below  this won t work if there are characters buffered in stdin  and there s really no good way to work around that   If you re running with a debugger attached  John Dibling s suggested solution is probably the cleanest solution to your problem   That said  I ll leave this here and maybe someone else will find it useful   I ve used it a lot as a quick hack of sorts when writing tests during development     At the end of your main function  you can call std  getchar     This will get a single character from stdin  thus giving you the  press any key to continue  sort of behavior  if you actually want a  press any key  message  you ll have to print one yourself    You need to  include  lt cstdio gt  for getchar

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you can try also doing this sleep  50000   cout  lt  lt   quot any text quot   lt  lt  endl   This will hold your code for 50000m  then prints message and closes  But please keep in mind that it will not pause forever

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Just add the following at the end of your program  It will try to capture some form of user input thus it stops the console from closing automatically   cin get

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Call cin get    2 times                 cin get        cin get        return 0

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Okay I m guessing you are on Windows using Visual Studio    why   Well because if you are on some sort of Linux OS then you d probably be running it from the console    Anyways  you can add crap to the end of your program like others are suggesting  or you can just hit CTRL   F5  start without debugging  and Visual Studio will leave the console up once complete   Another option if you want to run the Debug version and not add crap to your code is to open the console window  Start -  Run -  cmd  and navigate to your Debug output directory   Then  just enter the name of your executable and it will run your debug program in the console   You can then use Visual Studio s attach to process or something if you really want to

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If you are using Microsoft s Visual C   2010 Express and run into the issue with CTRL F5 not working for keeping the console open after the program has terminated  take a look at this MSDN thread   Likely your IDE is set to close the console after a CTRL F5 run  in fact  an  Empty Project  in Visual C   2010 closes the console by default  To change this  do as the Microsoft Moderator suggested      Please right click your project name and go to Properties page  please expand Configuration Properties -  Linker -  System  please select Console   SUBSYSTEM CONSOLE  in SubSystem dropdown  Because  by default  the Empty project does not specify it

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You can even declare an integer at the beginning of your main   function  say int a   and put std  cin  gt  gt  a  just before the return value  So the program will keep running until you press a key and enter

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If you run your code from a competent IDE  such as Code  Blocks  the IDE will manage the console it uses to run the code  keeping it open when the application closes  You don t want to add special code to keep the console open  because this will prevent it functioning correctly when you use it for real  outside of the IDE

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I m putting a breakpoint at the last return 0 of the program  It works fine

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simply   include  lt cstdio gt       int main               code            std  getchar            std  getchar            return 0          for some reason there is usually 1 character possible to read with getchar already in stdin when you run a program  so the first getchar reads this character  and the second getchar waits for user  your  input before exiting the program  And after a program exits most of terminals  especially on Windows close terminal immediately  so what we aim to is a simple way of preventing a program from finishing after it outputs everything  Of course there are more complex and clean ways to solve this  but this is the simplest

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This seems to work well   cin clear    cin ignore 2     If you clear the buffer first it won t be a problem when you read the next one  For some reason cin ignore 1  does not work  it has to be 2

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For Visual Studio  and only Visual Studio  the following code snippet gives you a  wait for keypress to continue  prompt that truly waits for the user to press a new key explicitly  by first flushing the input buffer    include  lt cstdio gt   include  lt tchar h gt   include  lt conio h gt    tprintf  T  Press a key to continue      while   kbhit      defined in conio h       gettch     gettch      Note that this uses the tchar h macro s to be compatible with multiple  character sets   as VC   calls them

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The solution by James works for all Platforms    Alternatively on Windows you can also add the following just before you return from main function     system  pause      This will run the pause command which waits till you press a key and also displays a nice message Press any key to continue

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If you are actually debugging your application in Visual C    press F5 or the green triangle on the toolbar  If you aren t really debugging it  you have no breakpoints set   press Ctrl F5 or choose Start Without Debugging on the menus  it s usually on the Debug menu  which I agree is confusing   It will be a little faster  and more importantly to you  will pause at the end without you having to change your code   Alternatively  open a command prompt  navigate to the folder where your exe is  and run it by typing its name  That way when it s finished running the command prompt doesn t close and you can see the output  I prefer both of these methods to adding code that stops the app just as its finished

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Add the following lines before any exit   function or before any returns in main     std  cout  lt  lt   Paused  press ENTER to continue    lt  lt  std  endl  cin ignore 100000    n

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Start in debug mode  run code with F5 to stop your console app  don t click on red cross but press CTRL-break and you ll hit all breakpoints in the end of your program

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Here s a problem  not so obvious   Somehow I had added a debug breakpoint at the very last line of my program    Not sure how I did that  perhaps with an erroneous mouse click while jumping between different screens   I m working in VS Code  And when I go to debug  the system jumps immediately to that breakpoint   No error message  no interim output  nothing   I m like  how did the program rush thru all my set breakpoints   This took too long to figure out  Apparently the system sees that last line breakpoint as a  quot first quot  stop   The simple fix   Delete that breakpoint  doh   insert forehead slap here

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All you have to do set a variable for x then just type this in before the return 0   cout lt  lt   nPress any key and hit enter to end      cin gt  gt x

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I used cin get   and that is worked but one day I needed to use another cin get  Array Variable   before that to grab a ling string with blank character in middle of  so the cin get   didn t avoid command prompt window from closing  Finally I found Another way   Press CTRL F5 to open in an external window  and Visual Studio does not have control over it anymore  Just will ask you about closing after final commands run

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Why not just run the program from a console ie run the program from cmd exe if you re using Windows  That way the window stays open after the program finishes    EDIT   When I use KDevelop4 there is a fully fledged instance of Bash  a Linux CLI  running in a tab at the bottom of the IDE  Which is what I use in these sort of circumstances

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See if your IDE has a checkbox in project setting to keep the window open after the program terminates  If not  use std  cin get    to read a character at the end of main function  However  be sure to use only line-based input  std  getline  or to deal with leftover unread characters otherwise  std  ignore until newline  because otherwise the  get   at the end will only read the garbage you left unread earlier

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Instead of pressing the run button  press CTRL and F5 at the same time  it will give you the press any key to continue message  Or type   warning use this only for testing not actual programs as an antiviruses don t like it       at the end of your main function but   warning use this only for testing not actual programs as an antiviruses don t like it

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You could always just create a batch file  For example  if your program is called helloworld exe  some code would be    echo off  1 cls call helloworld exe pause  gt nul goto  1

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simply put this at the end of your code   while 1      this function will keep going on forever or until you close the console   and will keep the console it from closing on its own

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I tried putting a getchar   function at the end  But it didn t work  So what I did was add two getchar   functions one after another  I think the first getchar   absorbs the Enter key you press after the last data input  So try adding two getchar   functions instead of one

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Before the end of your code  insert this line   system  pause      This will keep the console until you hit a key    include  lt iostream gt   include  lt string gt   using namespace std   int main         string s      cout  lt  lt   Please enter your first name followed by a newline n       cin  gt  gt  s      cout  lt  lt   Hello     lt  lt  s  lt  lt    n       system  pause        lt ----------------------------------     return 0     This return statement isn t necessary

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If you are running Windows  then you can do system  pause  gt nul    or system  pause     It executes a console command to pause the program until you press a key   gt nul prevents it from saying Press any key to continue

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just use cin ignore   right before return 0  twice  main           your codes     cin ignore      cin ignore       return 0        thats all

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I just do this     clear buffer  wait for input to close program std  cin clear    std  cin ignore INT MAX    n    std  cin get    return 0    Note  clearing the cin buffer and such is only necessary if you ve used cin at some point earlier in your program   Also using std  numeric limits  max   is probably better then INT MAX  but it s a bit wordy and usually unnecessary

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Use  include  stdafx h   amp  system  pause    just like the code down below    include  stdafx h   include  lt iostream gt  using namespace std  int main         std  cout  lt  lt   hello programmer  n nEnter 2 numbers         int x  y      std  cin  gt  gt  x  gt  gt  y      int w   x y      std  cout  lt  lt   nyour answer is    lt  lt  w  lt  lt  endl      system  pause

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Include conio h and at the end of your code  before return 0  write  getch

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If you are using Visual Studio and you are starting the console application out of the IDE   pressing CTRL-F5  start without debugging  will start the application and keep the console window open until you press any key

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Similar idea to yeh answer  just minimalist alternative   Create a batch file with the following content   helloworld exe pause   Then use the batch file

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