What is the Best Practice for Combating the Console Closing Issue?

Question

After compiling console programs the console window closes immediately after running. What is the best practice for keeping it open? I\'ve searched google loads, I\'m used t

Answer 1

The "don't do that" responses in this thread may seem curt, but they're fairly sensible. I happened across this question because I'm debugging a gtest suite that used to run fine, but now crashes mysteriously when launched. When run from the console, it pops up a dialog saying "blah.exe has stopped working"; but, when run from the debugger, the console pops up momentarily, vanishes, and the program exits with 0 status.

I should have been thinking about how odd this difference in behavior was, but instead I was like: "Aw, man---I gotta make that console window stay up so I can see what it says." Right?

It turns out that the machine I'm working on (a colleague of mine's) had the 'Command Arguments' for the debugger set to '--gtest_filter=*testMsg*'. I noticed this right away, too, but it never occurred to me that all the tests matching the filter had been renamed in a recent commit. So, when launched from the debugger, gtest wasn't finding any tests to run and was simply exiting. Another 90 minutes of my life I'll never get back. (-_-) I could have ditched this tar baby a lot sooner if my knee-jerk reaction hadn't been to think I needed that console window to stay open in order to solve the problem...

Answer 2

Since you always run in the debugger, set a breakpoint on the return statement from main().

The debugger is your best friend, learn (and learn early) to use it to your advantage at every opportunity.

Answer 3

A very common one is to just put in code to read a key from the console after your main application code closes. The keystroke read in just gets thrown away, but it holds the console open.

It's not pretty, necessarily - but I often do this wrapped in a debug define, so during debugging, the console is held open. During release, I'm usually not running inside VS, and when run from a command line, this is no longer an issue.

Answer 4

Call this function before you return at the end of main:

void onEnd()
{
    printf("Press any key to exit...");
    _getch();
}