gcc on Windows: generated "a.exe" file vanishes

(Since ahoffer's deleted answer isn't quite correct, I'll post this, based on information in the comments.)

On Windows, gcc generates an executable named a.exe by default. (On UNIX-like systems, the default name, for historical reasons, is a.out.) Normally you'd specify a name using the -o option.

Apparently the generated a.exe file generates a false positive match in your antivirus software, so the file is automatically deleted shortly after it's created. I see you've already contacted the developers of Avast about this false positive.

Note that antivirus programs typically check the contents of a file, not its name, so generating the file with a name other than a.exe won't help. Making some changes to the program might change the contents of the executable enough to avoid the problem, though.

You might try compiling a simple "hello, world" program to see if the same thing happens.

Thanks to Chrono Kitsune for linking to this relevant Mingw-users discussion in a comment.

This is not relevant to your problem, but you should print a newline ('\n') at the end of your program's output. It probably doesn't matter much in your Windows environment, but in general a program's standard output should (almost) always have a newline character at the end of its last line.

There is no issue with your code it is just exiting properly.

You have to run it in the command line which will show you all the info.

start->run->cmd, then cd to your directory. then a.exe. If you don't want to do that you can add a sleep() before the return in main.

More over, in your code when you pass print(5) to your function it's not being used.

Try to compile with gcc but without all standard libraries using a command like this:

gcc  -nostdlib -c  test.c -o test.o; gcc test.o -lgcc -o test.exe

One of the mingw libraries binary must generate a false positive, knowing which library would be useful.