Thread: Is my Console/computer borken?

Open up a cmd.exe window and run the exe from that.

Your question makes no sense to me; so, I guessed on the most likely answer.

Tim S.

Link to closest FAQ to your question I could find FAQ > Stop my Windows Console from disappearing everytime I run my program? - Cprogramming.com

Tim S.

Ask yourself a question - what does cin.get() actually do? Well, it extracts a char out of the input buffer. What is input buffer consisting of after cin >> a in your code? Say you entered "18" - the buffer will consist of "18\n". Yes, that '\n' is there. Then >> operator extracts 18 out of the buffer and does its magic to turn that string into an int value to store in your variable a. Now the buffer is consisting of... "\n". That's all.

If you'd now do another cin >> a, and you'd enter "20", your buffer would look like this: "\n20\n". Then >> operator will start looking for a string that can be considered "numerical" but - aha! - it is programmed to ignore initial whitespace, and '\n' is considered as such. So, it will extract it and ignore it, then extract "20" and turn it into an int to store in your variable a. Then the buffer will be consisting of another lonely "\n".

Now if you do cin.get() - you'll exctract the next char in the input buffer... That being our lonely newline character, because cin.get() does not ignore whitespace. Why should it?

Since there's already a character to extract in input buffer you never get to be asked for it through the terminal. However, if you clear the input buffer just before doing that, it will work as expected.

Code:

cin.clear(); // check the docs to see what it does
cin.ignore(std::numeric_limits<std::streamsize>::max(), '\n') // ignores any amount of input till newline
cin.get();

However, you're probably better off with not using it at all. You could open your terminal and navigate (cd) to your working directory. There are terminal emulators on both *nix and Windows that are prettier than your standard cmd window (ConEmu is nice, with tabs and flexible display). Don't be afraid to use it. Also, usually when using a good IDE it will keep it open for you anyway.