Simple C hello world program is not working in Visual Studio Code

Question

I am fairly new to C coding and cannot get a simple C hello world code to work with Visual Studio Code. The code looks like this:

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
   // printf() displays the string inside quotation
   printf("Hello, World!");
   return 0;
} 

and I get two error messages:

line 2: syntax error near unexpected token `('
line 2: `int main() {'

Any suggestions on what can be going wrong?

Answer 1

Here is a screenshot of the C code in the question (hello.c) running correctly in Visual Studio Code. In order to run hello.c in Code Runner right-click the code and select Run Code.

^{(Click image to enlarge)}

Please note in the left pane that I have the C/C++ extension and the Code Runner extension installed in Visual Studio Code. Please note in the tabs below the menu bar that the C code has been saved in a file named hello.c. Please note in the bottom pane that Code Runner executed this C code by running the following command:

cd "/home/karel/Desktop/" && gcc tempCodeRunnerFile.c -o tempCodeRunnerFile && "/home/karel/Desktop/"tempCodeRunnerFile