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An example of the printf function. printf is a C standard library function that formats text and writes it to standard output.. The name, printf is short for print formatted where print refers to output to a printer although the functions are not limited to printer output.
In Unix and Unix-like operating systems, printf is a shell builtin (and utility program [2]) that formats and outputs text like the same-named C function. Originally named for outputting to a printer, it actually outputs to standard output. [3] The command accepts a format string, which specifies how to format values, and a list of values.
For example, an integer can be printed using the "%d" formatting code, e.g.: printf("%d", 42); This formats the integer "42" as text and prints it to the standard output. printf is typically the first function any C programmer encounters, because it is the only function which appears in the standard Hello world program:
In the above example, the main( ) function defines where the program should start executing. The function body consists of a single statement, a call to the printf() function, which stands for "print formatted"; it outputs to the console whatever is passed to it as the parameter, in this case the string "hello, world".
The C programming language provides many standard library functions for file input and output.These functions make up the bulk of the C standard library header <stdio.h>. [1] The functionality descends from a "portable I/O package" written by Mike Lesk at Bell Labs in the early 1970s, [2] and officially became part of the Unix operating system in Version 7.
Some compilers (for example, GCC [7]) provide built-in versions of many of the functions in the C standard library; that is, the implementations of the functions are written into the compiled object file, and the program calls the built-in versions instead of the functions in the C library shared object file.
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For example, \11 is an octal escape sequence denoting a byte with decimal value 9 (11 in octal). However, \1111 is the octal escape sequence \111 followed by the digit 1 . In order to denote the byte with numerical value 1, followed by the digit 1 , one could use "\1""1" , since C concatenates adjacent string literals.