The Terminal on Mac: Coding Post: 302939026

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Operating Systems OS X (Apple) The Terminal on Mac: Coding Post 302939026 by Don Cragun on Saturday 21st of March 2015 06:31:33 AM

03-21-2015

Registered User

There are a few issues here:

"Terminal" is an application that emulates a terminal with characteristics similar to a DEC VT-220 terminal with a variable screen size. It is incapable of executing commands, (including compiling any type of source code). OS X runs some command (usually a shell such as bash, csh, ksh, sh [a version of bash on OS X], tcsh, or zsh) and that command running in terminal may be able to execute commands.
I have never seen a shell with a built-in C language compiler either, although in theory that is possible.
So, to compile a C program, in addition to terminal and a shell, you need a compiler. OS X out of the box doesn't contain a compiler, but you can download the Xcode package from the app store which will give you some compilers (including cc, gcc, c++), the tools you need to turn a compiled program into an executable object, utilities like lex, make, and yacc), and graphical tools to build OS X and iOS applications to run on Macs, iPads, iPhones, iWatches, and other devices. So, download and install Xcode.

Then (assuming your source code is in a file named calc.c), you can compile your code into an executable file named calc with either of the following commands typed into the shell you have running in terminal:

Code:

make calc
     or
cc -o calc calc.c

But, I wouldn't consider this code to be a good example of C coding, and would be very surprised if it produced the output you might expect:

it is missing several headers that are needed to define function prototypes,
it calls printf() without a format string operand seemingly assuming that it will magically use an integer argument passed in as a pointer to a format string to print the value of that integer,
it uses the system() function to invoke a command that is not available on OS X systems (for no apparent reason),
(if you have written and installed a command named pause and it exits), waits for the user to type in another character for no apparent reason,
and then (if the character typed was "q" or any other character), exits.

I hope this helps...

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