how to read anything after EOF has occured

I was studing the c programming book of k & r. There is this program to count no of characters in input

#include<stdio.h>
main()
{
long nc;
nc=开发者_StackOverflow社区0;
while(getchar()!=EOF)
     ++nc;
printf("%ld\n",nc);
}

I was wondering how come after EOF has occured nc can be printed. Is there any way to it.

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The end-of-file condition only affects stdin, not stdout. Note that there are no uses of stdin after the EOF is found, just printouts to stdout.

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I think you're getting two different things mixed up. EOF is with regard to input. printf is an output function.

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getchar() reads from stdin. printf() writes to stdout. They are different streams that usually map to the same physical device (console or terminal).

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You should not count on a Ctrl-Z or any terminator If you were counting on that and were running on traditional *nix shells you would suspend your process rather than terminate the input (read up on JOB CONTROL, in man bash, for example)

(I know this answer comes a bit late but I see you keep mentioning Ctrl-Z in you responses to other answers)

If you are on a *nix system you can use Ctrl-D, but dont expect that to end up in your input stream (its just used as a signaling mechanism).m You can also test this with a file input which should give you more consistent results than typing, i.e.

a.out < prog.c

to count the lines in your c program