title: C beginner - Hello World program not doing anything on Windows from command prompt
body: <p>I'm about to start learning C (I need to program something in C, to convert it into MIPS later).</p>
  
  <p>I'm on Windows 8, and downloaded MinGW and set the path variable to its directory, so that the gcc or g++ commands should work in command prompt.</p>
  
  <p>I copied the following Hello World example into a .c text file.</p>
  
  <pre><code>#include&lt;stdio.h&gt;
  
  int main(void)
  { // This is a comment
    printf("Hello world!\n");
    return 0;
  } 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, although I'm in the correct directory as the file, on command prompt when I type "gcc helloWorld.c" it pauses for a couple of seconds, and then doesn't do anything. It just acts as if the program has finished and allows me to type something else in.</p>
  
  <p>This is likely to be a simple mistake - I don't really understand what I'm doing. But can anyone help me out?</p>