Why is my while loop activated, but nothing else happens? - c

Question

So right now I'm trying to mess around with stdin and an input file by doing the following:
./a.exe < input.txt
The input.txt file just has a lot of random test cases so I can see if I'm doing this right or not. I'm trying to remove some punctuation marks from my input file through the use of stdin. You will notice that I have a couple of printf's laying in there saying "here". I put that there to see if the program reaches it or not.
So whenever I run it, I type "./a.exe < input.txt", and I get "bash: input.txt: No such file or directory". So I'm like... okay, I'll just type in a couple of random inputs to see if it works. I typed in random words, and it turns out the program doesn't even hit any of the words I typed after ./a.exe.
Can anyone explain why I'm having these errors?
Here's my code:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
char textin[80], wordout[80];
int i, j;
int count = 0;
printf("%d", argc);
while (count != argc)
{
scanf("%s", textin);
if (strcmp(textin, ".") == 0)
printf("here");
printf("here2");
strcpy(wordout, textin);
for (i = 0 ; i < strlen(wordout) ; i++)
{
if (wordout[i] == '.' || wordout[i] == ',' ||
wordout[i] == '"' || wordout[i] == ';' ||
wordout[i] == '!' || wordout[i] == '?' ||
wordout[i] == '(' || wordout[i] == ')' ||
wordout[i] == ':')
{
for (j = i ; j < strlen(wordout) - 1 ; j++)
wordout[j] = wordout[j + 1];
wordout[j] = '\0';
}
printf("here3");
}
printf("%s\n", wordout);
count++;
}
return 0;
}

Answer 1

That first issue has nothing to do with your program, the error you're getting is a bash error, trying to open input.txt to connect to the standard input of your a.exe program. This happens before your code even begins to run.
You need to figure out why bash can't find your file, such as:
are you in the correct directory?
does the input.txt file actually exist?
have you created it in such a way that there are special characters in the file name (such as inpux<backspace>t.txt)?
As to the other issue, you appear to be using a mish-mash of two different methods of getting information from the user.
These two methods are arguments passed to the program (argc/v) and standard input (scanf()).
It may be that you're running your code with something like:
./a.exe arg1 arg2 arg3
and expecting it to do something with them. Unfortunately, the scanf() inside your loop will simply wait for you to type something on the terminal so it may seem that it has hung.
I think you need to figure out how you want to present the input to the program. If it's via arguments, you would use argv[N] where 1 <= N < argc. If it's via standard input, you probably don't need to concern yourself with argc/v at all.