How to stop C++ console application from exiting immediately?

Question

If you are using Visual Studio and you are starting the console application out of the IDE:

pressing CTRL-F5 (start without debugging) will start the application and keep the console window open until you press any key.

Edit: As Charles Bailey rightly points out in a comment below, this won't work if there are characters buffered in stdin, and there's really no good way to work around that. If you're running with a debugger attached, John Dibling's suggested solution is probably the cleanest solution to your problem.

That said, I'll leave this here and maybe someone else will find it useful. I've used it a lot as a quick hack of sorts when writing tests during development.

---

At the end of your main function, you can call std::getchar();

This will get a single character from stdin, thus giving you the "press any key to continue" sort of behavior (if you actually want a "press any key" message, you'll have to print one yourself).

You need to #include <cstdio> for getchar.

The solution by James works for all Platforms.

Alternatively on Windows you can also add the following just before you return from main function:

  system("pause");

This will run the pause command which waits till you press a key and also displays a nice message Press any key to continue . . .

If you are using Microsoft's Visual C++ 2010 Express and run into the issue with CTRL+F5 not working for keeping the console open after the program has terminated, take a look at this MSDN thread.

Likely your IDE is set to close the console after a CTRL+F5 run; in fact, an "Empty Project" in Visual C++ 2010 closes the console by default. To change this, do as the Microsoft Moderator suggested:

Please right click your project name and go to Properties page, please expand Configuration Properties -> Linker -> System, please select Console (/SUBSYSTEM:CONSOLE) in SubSystem dropdown. Because, by default, the Empty project does not specify it.

I usually just put a breakpoint on main()'s closing curly brace. When the end of the program is reached by whatever means the breakpoint will hit and you can ALT-Tab to the console window to view the output.

Why not just run the program from a console ie run the program from cmd.exe if you're using Windows. That way the window stays open after the program finishes.

[EDIT]: When I use KDevelop4 there is a fully fledged instance of Bash (a Linux CLI) running in a tab at the bottom of the IDE. Which is what I use in these sort of circumstances.