C - Hold the console window open

Question

My question is super simple  but I m transitioning from C  to C    and I was wondering what command holds the console window open in C     I know in C   the most basic way is   Console ReadLine      Or if you want to let the user press any key  its   Console ReadKey true     How do you do this in C    The only reason I ask this simple of a question here  is that I haven t been able to find a good and clear answer out there on the internet

User · Answer

If your problem is retaining the Console Window within Visual Studio without modifying your application (c-code) and are running it with Ctrl+F5 (when running Ctrl+F5) but the window is still closing the principal hint is to set the /SUBSYSTEM:CONSOLE linker option in your Visual Studio project.

as explained by DJMooreTX in http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vcprerelease/thread/21073093-516c-49d2-81c7-d960f6dc2ac6

1) Open up your project, and go to the Solution Explorer. If you're following along with me in K&R, your "Solution" will be 'hello' with 1 project under it, also 'hello' in bold.

Right click on the 'hello" (or whatever your project name is.)
Choose "Properties" from the context menu.
Choose Configuration Properties>Linker>System.
For the "Subsystem" property in the right-hand pane, click the drop-down box in the right hand column.
Choose "Console (/SUBSYSTEM:CONSOLE)"
Click Apply, wait for it to finish doing whatever it does, then click OK. (If "Apply" is grayed out, choose some other subsystem option, click Apply, then go back and apply the console option. My experience is that OK by itself won't work.)

Now do Boris' CTRL-F5, wait for your program to compile and link, find the console window under all the other junk on your desktop, and read your program's output, followed by the beloved "Press any key to continue...." prompt.

Again, CTRL-F5 and the subsystem hints work together; they are not separate options.

User · Answer

How about std  cin get       Also  if you re using Visual Studio  you can run without debugging  CTRL-F5 by default  and it won t close the console at the end  If you run it with debugging  you could always put a breakpoint at the closing brace of main

User · Answer

if you create a console application  console will stay opened until you close the application   if you already creat an application and you dont know how to open a console  you can change the subsystem as Console  Subsystem Console  in project configurations -  linker -  system

User · Answer

Roughly the same kinds of things you ve done in C   Calling getch   is probably the simplest

User · Answer

A more appropriate method is to use std  cin ignore      include  lt iostream gt   void Pause        std  cout  lt  lt   Press Enter to continue         std  cout flush       std  cin ignore 10000    n       return

User · Answer

The right way  cin get      cin get   is C   compliant  and portable  It will retrieve the next character from the standard input  stdin   The user can press enter and your program will then continue to execute  or terminate in our case   Microsoft s take  Microsoft has a Knowledge Base Article titled Preventing the Console Window from Disappearing  It describes how to pause execution only when necessary  i e  only when the user has spawned a new console window by executing the program from explorer  The code is in C which I ve reproduced here     include  lt windows h gt   include  lt stdio h gt   include  lt conio h gt   CONSOLE SCREEN BUFFER INFO csbi  HANDLE hStdOutput  BOOL bUsePause   void main void            hStdOutput   GetStdHandle STD OUTPUT HANDLE           if   GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo hStdOutput   amp csbi                             printf  GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo failed   d n   GetLastError                     return                        if cursor position is  0 0  then use pause         bUsePause      csbi dwCursorPosition X   amp  amp                         csbi dwCursorPosition Y             printf  Interesting information to read  n            printf  More interesting information to read  n                only pause if running in separate console window          if  bUsePause                            int ch                  printf   n tPress any key to exit    n                    ch   getch                  I ve used this myself and it s a nice way to do it  under windows only of course  Note also you can achieve this non-programatically under windows by launching your program with this command   cmd  K consoleapp exe   The wrong way  Do not use any of the following to achieve this   system  PAUSE      This will execute the windows command  pause  by spawning a new cmd exe command com process within your program  This is both completely unnecessary and also non-portable since the pause command is windows-specific  Unfortunately I ve seen this a lot   getch      This is not a part of the C C   standard library  It is just a compiler extension and some compilers won t support it

User · Answer

You can also lean on the IDE a little   If you run the program using the  Start without debugging  command  Ctrl F5 for me   the console window will stay open even after the program ends with a  Press any key to continue        message     Of course  if want to use the  Hit any key  to keep your program running  i e  keep a thread alive   this won t work   And it does not work when you run  with debugging    But then you can use break points to hold the window open

User · Answer

hey first of all to include c   functions you should use include lt iostream h gt  instead    of stdio  h and to hold the output screen there is a simple command getch    here  is an example        include lt iostream h gt      include lt conio h gt     void main      or int main    if you want         cout lt  lt  quot c  is more advanced than c   quot       getch         thank you

User · Answer

In windows  you can use  getch   in the    lt conio h gt    header

User · Answer

As Thomas says  the cin ignore is a good way  To always wait for user to press enter  even if exit is used   register a function atexit    include  lt iostream gt   void pause         std  cout lt  lt   nPress ENTER to exit          std  cin sync        if   std  cin get      n             std  cin ignore 0xFFFFFFFF   n       int main         atexit pause           whatever      return 0

User · Answer

I use std  getwchar   in my environment which is with mingw32 - gcc-4 6 2 compiler  Here is a sample code    include  lt iostream gt   include  Arithmetics h   using namespace std   int main         ARITHMETICS H  testPriorities         cout  lt  lt   Press any key to exit    lt  lt  endl      getwchar        return 0

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