Why is VSCode not able to read from files in the same directory as the opened file?

Question

I have searched this up and tried multiple launch.json and tasks.json configurations and nothing seems to work. The program that I wrote in c++ works when I read from console, so the issue isn't with the original code. I have tried with multiple programs and never have I been able to get it to read from a file. I was hoping you could help. This is my launch.json:

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
        "configurations": [
        {
          "name": "C/C++: gcc.exe build and debug active file",
          "type": "cppdbg",
          "request": "launch",
          "program": "${fileDirname}\\${fileBasenameNoExtension}.exe",
          "args": [],
          "stopAtEntry": false,
          "cwd": "${fileDirname}",
          "environment": [],
          "externalConsole": false,
          "MIMode": "gdb",
        "miDebuggerPath": "C:\\msys64\\mingw64\\bin\\gdb.exe",
        "setupCommands": [
        {
          "description": "Enable pretty-printing for gdb",
          "text": "-enable-pretty-printing",
          "ignoreFailures": true
        },
       ],
     
      }
      ],
      "preLaunchTask": "C/C++: gcc.exe build active file"
      }

And this is my tasks.json:

{
    "tasks": [
        {
            "type": "cppbuild",
            "label": "C/C++: g++.exe build active file",
            "command": "C:\\Program Files\\CodeBlocks\\MinGW\\bin\\g++.exe",
            "args": [
                "-fdiagnostics-color=always",
                "-g",
                "${file}",
                "-o",
                "${fileDirname}\\${fileBasenameNoExtension}.exe"
            ],
            "options": {
                "cwd": "C:\\Program Files\\CodeBlocks\\MinGW\\bin"
            },
            "problemMatcher": [
                "$gcc"
            ],
            "group": {
                "kind": "build",
                "isDefault": true
            },
            "detail": "Task generated by Debugger."
        }
    ],
    "version": "2.0.0"
}

For example, a file "bac.in" contains the numbers 1 7 2 1 1 2 1 7 2. When running this program, the console shows 0 instead of 144:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
using namespace std;

ifstream fin("bac.in");
int a[10];

int main()
{ 
    int S=0, i;
    while ( fin >> i )
    {
        if ( a[i] == 0 )
        {
            a[i]= 1;
            S += 10;
        }
        S += i*i;
    }
    cout << S;
    return 0;
}