Thread: fgets erroneoulsy returns null string

I have been working on a problem that is driving me crazy. The fgets now returns null strings instead of the strings in the file it is reading. I extracted the code to the simplest snippet (below). I have changed my gcc from 3.4 to 4.1.1, reloaded all libraries I can identify in cygwin. fgets does work on stdin. My environment is Windows Server 2003 running Cygwin with gcc compiler. The only thing I can say that changed was the installation of gdb 6.5 (debugger) which I loaded to troubleshoot another problem (which I found and fixed). So, what libraries should I be looking at?

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Leon

Here's sample code:

Code:

#include <stdio.h>

char ch[100];
char temp_str[200];
char read_string[200];
FILE *conf_file;

int main(void)
{
  printf("enter a string to test the fgets function on stdin: ");
  fgets(ch,100,stdin);
  printf("stdin string is: %s\n",ch);
  /* open the config file*/
  sprintf(temp_str, "D:\\c_projects\\logs.c");
  conf_file = fopen(temp_str, "r");
  if (conf_file == NULL)
  {
    printf("fatal error - failed to open file: %s", temp_str); 
    exit(1);
  }
  if (feof(conf_file))
  {
    printf("end of file encountered\n");
    exit(1);
  }

  printf("file: %s has been opened\n", temp_str);

  while ( fgets(read_string, strlen(read_string), conf_file) != NULL)
  {
    if (ferror(conf_file))
    {
      printf("read config fail error\n");
      exit(1);
    }
    printf("read_string is: %s\n", read_string);
  }
}

Thanks! It is amazing how I can look and look and not see what I did wrong!