system(“pause”); - Why is it wrong?

Question

Here\'s a question that I don\'t quite understand:

The command, system(\"pause\"); is taught to new programmers as a way to pause a program and wait for

Answer 1

It's frowned upon because it's a platform-specific hack that has nothing to do with actually learning programming, but instead to get around a feature of the IDE/OS - the console window launched from Visual Studio closes when the program has finished execution, and so the new user doesn't get to see the output of his new program.

Bodging in System("pause") runs the Windows command-line "pause" program and waits for that to terminate before it continues execution of the program - the console window stays open so you can read the output.

A better idea would be to put a breakpoint at the end and debug it, but that again has problems.

Answer 2

It's all a matter of style. It's useful for debugging but otherwise it shouldn't be used in the final version of the program. It really doesn't matter on the memory issue because I'm sure that those guys who invented the system("pause") were anticipating that it'd be used often. In another perspective, computers get throttled on their memory for everything else we use on the computer anyways and it doesn't pose a direct threat like dynamic memory allocation, so I'd recommend it for debugging code, but nothing else.

Answer 3

Using system("pause"); is Ungood Practice™ because

• It's completely unnecessary.
  To keep the program's console window open at the end when you run it from Visual Studio, use Ctrl+F5 to run it without debugging, or else place a breakpoint at the last right brace } of main. So, no problem in Visual Studio. And of course no problem at all when you run it from the command line.

• It's problematic & annoying
  when you run the program from the command line. For interactive execution you have to press a key at the end to no purpose whatsoever. And for use in automation of some task that pause is very much undesired!

• It's not portable.
  Unix-land has no standard pause command.

The pause command is an internal cmd.exe command and can't be overridden, as is erroneously claimed in at least one other answer. I.e. it's not a security risk, and the claim that AV programs diagnose it as such is as dubious as the claim of overriding the command (after all, a C++ program invoking system is in position to do itself all that the command interpreter can do, and more). Also, while this way of pausing is extremely inefficient by the usual standards of C++ programming, that doesn't matter at all at the end of a novice's program.

So, the claims in the horde of answers before this are not correct, and the main reason you shouldn't use system("pause") or any other wait command at the end of your main, is the first point above: it's completely unnecessary, it serves absolutely no purpose, it's just very silly.

Answer 4

the pro's to using system("PAUSE"); while creating the small portions of your program is for debugging it yourself. if you use it to get results of variables before during and after each process you are using to assure that they are working properly.

After testing and moving it into full swing with the rest of the solution you should remove these lines. it is really good when testing an user-defined algorithm and assuring that you are doing things in the proper order for results that you want.

In no means do you want to use this in an application after you have tested it and assured that it is working properly. However it does allow you to keep track of everything that is going on as it happens. Don't use it for End-User apps at all.

Answer 5

You can use std::cin.get() from iostream:

#include <iostream> // std::cout, std::cin
using namespace std;

int main() {
   do {
     cout << '\n' << "Press the Enter key to continue.";
   } while (cin.get() != '\n');

   return 0;
}

Besides, system('pause') is slow, and includes a file you probably don't need: stdlib.h. It is platform-dependent, and actually calls up a 'virtual' OS.

Answer 6

In summary, it has to pause the programs execution and make a system call and allocate unnecessary resources when you could be using something as simple as cin.get(). People use System("PAUSE") because they want the program to wait until they hit enter to they can see their output. If you want a program to wait for input, there are built in functions for that which are also cross platform and less demanding.

Further explanation in this article.