A mistake in the K & R bible?

Hello,

the following excerpt is taken from "The C Programming Language" by K & R:

Code:

---

main()
{
      int c;
      while ((c = getchar()) != EOF)
          putchar(c);
}

The while gets a character, assigns it to c, and then tests whether the character was the end- of-file signal. If it was not, the body of the while is executed, printing the character. The while then repeats. When the end of the input is finally reached, the while terminates and so does main.

---

The code doesn't work as described, though. The entered characters are printed only after I press Enter or enter the EOF signal. They are not printed one by one as the authors suggest.

This is very strange programatically and very difficult for me to grasp. Eg. I enter ten characters and press Enter and only then is the body of the loop executed ten times... Strange... Any comments that might make this a bit clearer for me?

The C lang bible was written for coders on the Unix platform.
Do you happen to be working on a Unix or Linux platform?

Edit:
argh! I misread the post.
putchar() buffers stdout until it sees a newline '\n'.
see the manpage of putchar() for more information.

Input is basically always line-buffered, meaning the input doesn't go to the program until you press enter.

Modern OSs like Windows and Linux use buffered I/O... generally not delivering a keyboard stream to your code until you press enter. Then it will forward the entire buffer at once.

It's not an error in either the OS or K%R... it's just the way these things work.

Triple Play! ... 3 in one minute.... LOL.

stdin is buffered, so what you type at the command prompt isn't transmitted to your program until you hit enter or the EOF key (Ctrl-D in Linux, Ctrl-Z in Windows).

It's worth noting that stdout is also buffered. The output buffer typically isn't flushed until one of the following happens:
1. You ask the user for more input
2. A new line ('\n') is printed
3. The buffer is manually flushed with fflush(stdout)
4. The buffer is filled up without encountering a new line, and is flushed automatically to make room for more output

But just because you can force out the output with fflush(stdout), don't think you can fflush(stdin). It's undefined behavior, probably wont work and might even crash your program.

This is a list of known errors in K&R
Errata for The C Programming Language, Second Edition