Why does printf return a value?

Question

I know that printf returns a negative error or number of characters printed on success. Only reason to check this return value is if the execution of program s

Answer 1

It is mostly for the purposes of error checking. You can make sure that the operation was successful or not using the return value.

If a non-negative value is returned (indicating the number of characters written) it means the operation was successful. If a negative number is returned there was some error.

For example,

#include 
#include 

int main(void)
{
    int result = printf("This is a test!");
    if (result > 0)
    {
        printf("%d characters were written!", result);
        return EXIT_SUCCESS;
    }
    else return EXIT_FAILURE;
}