Why Ctrl-Z does not trigger EOF?

Question

Why Ctrl+Z does not trigger the loop to finish on the following small program?

#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
    int c;
    while ((c = getchar()) != EOF)
    {
        //nothing 
    }

    return 0;
}

If I enter: test^ZEnter, it does not get out of the loop.

I found related questions around (here and here) but none to explain it for C (not C++) under Windows.

Note: I use Visual Studio 2015 PRE on a windows 8.1

Answer 1

You need to hit Enter and then use ctrl+Z and then Enter again.

or, you may also use F6

Answer 2

EOF like you use it is not a character. It's the status in which that stream is.

I mean, heck, you even link this question, so you might as well read the accepted answer:

The underlying form of an EOF is a zero-length read.

It's not an "EOF character".

http://www.c-faq.com/stdio/getcharc.html cites a different case than yours, where someone stored the return value of getchar in a char. The underlying problem still occurs occasionally: different runtimes implement different values for the EOF integer (which is why I said, it's not an EOF character), and things love to go wrong. Especially in Visual C++, which is not a "real" C compiler but a C++ compiler with a compatibility mode, it seems things can go wrong.