Command Line Arguments Issue - visual-studio-code

Question

I have an executable file a.out in my workspace that I am trying to call with the argument hello.txt.
When I run ./a.out hello.txt in the terminal, it works. However, when try to do this with VSC, hello.txt is not getting passed to the executable.
I've verified my json files extensively, but I cannot figure out where the issue is coming from. Any help would be greatly appreciated. My tasks.json and launch.json are below:
tasks.json:
{
"tasks": [
{
"type": "cppbuild",
"label": "C/C++: gcc-9 build active file",
"command": "/usr/bin/gcc-9",
"args": [
"-fdiagnostics-color=always",
"-g",
"${file}",
"-o",
"${fileDirname}/a.out"
],
"options": {
"cwd": "${fileDirname}"
},
"problemMatcher": [
"$gcc"
],
"group": {
"kind": "build",
"isDefault": true
},
"detail": "Task generated by Debugger."
}
],
"version": "2.0.0"
}
launch.json:
{
"name": "C Launch",
"request": "launch",
"program": "${workspaceFolder}/a.out",
"args": ["${workspaceFolder}/hello.txt"],
"cwd": "${workspaceFolder}"
}