What does it mean to write to stdout in C?

Question

Does a program that writes to \"stdout\" write to a file? the screen? I don\'t understand what it means to write to stdout.

Answer 1

@K Scott Piel wrote a great answer here, but I want to add one important point.

Note that the stdout stream is usually line-buffered, so to ensure the output is actually printed and not just left sitting in the buffer waiting to be written you must flush the buffer by either ending your printf statement with a \n

Ex:

printf("hello world\n");

or

printf("hello world"); 
printf("\n");

or similar, OR you must call fflush(stdout); after your printf call.

Ex:

printf("hello world"); 
fflush(stdout);

Read more here: Why does printf not flush after the call unless a newline is in the format string?