How do I properly compare strings in C?

You can't (usefully) compare strings using != or ==, you need to use strcmp:

while (strcmp(check,input) != 0)

The reason for this is because != and == will only compare the base addresses of those strings. Not the contents of the strings themselves.

Ok a few things: gets is unsafe and should be replaced with fgets(input, sizeof(input), stdin) so that you don't get a buffer overflow.

Next, to compare strings, you must use strcmp, where a return value of 0 indicates that the two strings match. Using the equality operators (ie. !=) compares the address of the two strings, as opposed to the individual chars inside them.

And also note that, while in this example it won't cause a problem, fgets stores the newline character, '\n' in the buffers also; gets() does not. If you compared the user input from fgets() to a string literal such as "abc" it would never match (unless the buffer was too small so that the '\n' wouldn't fit in it).

Use strcmp.

This is in string.h library, and is very popular. strcmp return 0 if the strings are equal. See this for an better explanation of what strcmp returns.

Basically, you have to do:

while (strcmp(check,input) != 0)

or

while (!strcmp(check,input))

or

while (strcmp(check,input))

You can check this, a tutorial on strcmp.