A valid loop for pausing a program after it ends

Question

I'm a novice programmer and have been learning C++ recently, after some research in how to pause my program at the end I upgraded from

system.get();

to a

cin.ignore();   
cin.get();

combo. Would I be better suited to writing an if loop to wait for input at the end to close out the program, I understand that later in my experiences pausing the program at the end will cause user errors at the end.

I'm looking for the better way to do this.

You are probably using visual studio. Instead of blocking the program's exit consider pressing CTRL+F5 instead. — nwp, Mar 01 '18 at 17:37
See if you can get what you want by placing a breakpoint on the final line in the program. — user4581301, Mar 01 '18 at 17:38
As nwp says, the "best way" is to not rely on the program itself to implement the pause, but rather configure your environment to pause for you to view the output. In the real world, programs shouldn't prompt a user to continue just to give them time to view output logs. The logs will be written to an appropriate file for viewing if necessary. — Patrick Roberts, Mar 01 '18 at 17:38
And yet I have been known to put a `getch();` at the end of my programs too... — Michael Dorgan, Mar 01 '18 at 17:41
[The better way is to _not_.](https://stackoverflow.com/a/36374595/560648) — Lightness Races in Orbit, Mar 01 '18 at 17:49

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 01 '18 at 18:15

In general, you don't need a loop to wait for the User to press a key.

Try:

std::cout << "Paused.  Press ENTER to continue.\n";
std::cin.ignore(10000, '\n');

This does not rely on the OS having a "pause" command.

Note: you may need a loop if you are polling for a keypress. Detecting a keypress is an operating system function, and you need to use specific OS API.

A valid loop for pausing a program after it ends

1 Answers1