c - What is “standard input”?

Question

I was tasked with creating a test program in C that reads the contents of the standard input and then prints them.

But I have a little doubt: what is exactly standard input?

Is it what I type in the keyboard? Is it a file I have to read?

Both of them?

And the same goes for standard output: is it the console? a file?

Answer 1

The C standard (e.g. C99 or C11) defines what should be expected from the standard <stdio.h> header (after having suitably #include-d it). See stdio(3) man page. Then you have the stdin and stdout and stderr file handles (pointers to some FILE which is an abstract data type).

The fact that stdin is related to some device (e.g. a keyboard) is implementation specific.

You could (but that would be unethical and/or inefficient) implement the C standard with e.g. a room of human slaves (that is unethical, if you use paid workers that would be just inefficient), instead of using a computer. Often, computers gives your some implementation of the C standard thru the help of some operating system.

You may want to know, inside your C program, if stdin is a "keyboard" or redirected from some "file". Unfortunately, AFAIK, there is no C99-standard way to know that.

As you mention, stdin, stdout and stderr should be available in your program at startup (i.e. after entering main ....). Hence, unless you fclose the stdin stream, you can read it (with getchar, scanf, getline, fgets, fscanf ... and friends) without any prior care (so you don't need to fopen it yourself).

On Linux or most Posix systems, you might use as an approximation isatty(STDIN_FILENO) - see isatty(3) for more - to test if stdin "is" the "keyboard" (by testing if it is some tty). See also this & that.