How does ifstream's eof() work?

-1 is get's way of saying you've reached the end of file. Compare it using the std::char_traits<char>::eof() (or std::istream::traits_type::eof()) - avoid -1, it's a magic number. (Although the other one is a bit verbose - you can always just call istream::eof)

The EOF flag is only set once a read tries to read past the end of the file. If I have a 3 byte file, and I only read 3 bytes, EOF is false, because I've not tried to read past the end of the file yet. While this seems confusing for files, which typically know their size, EOF is not known until a read is attempted on some devices, such as pipes and network sockets.

The second example works as inf >> foo will always return inf, with the side effect of attempt to read something and store it in foo. inf, in an if or while, will evaluate to true if the file is "good": no errors, no EOF. Thus, when a read fails, inf evaulates to false, and your loop properly aborts. However, take this common error:

while(!inf.eof())  // EOF is false here
{
    inf >> x;      // read fails, EOF becomes true, x is not set
    // use x       // we use x, despite our read failing.
}

However, this:

while(inf >> x)  // Attempt read into x, return false if it fails
{
    // will only be entered if read succeeded.
}

Which is what we want.

The EOF flag is only set after a read operation attempts to read past the end of the file. get() is returning the symbolic constant traits::eof() (which just happens to equal -1) because it reached the end of the file and could not read any more data, and only at that point will eof() be true. If you want to check for this condition, you can do something like the following:

int ch;
while ((ch = inf.get()) != EOF) {
    std::cout << static_cast<char>(ch) << "\n";
}

iostream doesn't know it's at the end of the file until it tries to read that first character past the end of the file.

The sample code at cplusplus.com says to do it like this: (But you shouldn't actually do it this way)

  while (is.good())     // loop while extraction from file is possible
  {
    c = is.get();       // get character from file
    if (is.good())
      cout << c;
  }

A better idiom is to move the read into the loop condition, like so: (You can do this with all istream read operations that return *this, including the >> operator)

  char c;
  while(is.get(c))
    cout << c;