_Exit(3p) — Linux manual page

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_EXIT(3P)               POSIX Programmer's Manual              _EXIT(3P)

PROLOG         top

       This manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual.  The
       Linux implementation of this interface may differ (consult the
       corresponding Linux manual page for details of Linux behavior),
       or the interface may not be implemented on Linux.

NAME         top

       _Exit, _exit — terminate a process

SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <stdlib.h>

       void _Exit(int status);

       #include <unistd.h>

       void _exit(int status);

DESCRIPTION         top

       For _Exit(): The functionality described on this reference page
       is aligned with the ISO C standard. Any conflict between the
       requirements described here and the ISO C standard is
       unintentional. This volume of POSIX.1‐2017 defers to the ISO C
       standard.

       The value of status may be 0, EXIT_SUCCESS, EXIT_FAILURE, or any
       other value, though only the least significant 8 bits (that is,
       status & 0377) shall be available from wait() and waitpid(); the
       full value shall be available from waitid() and in the siginfo_t
       passed to a signal handler for SIGCHLD.

       The _Exit() and _exit() functions shall be functionally
       equivalent.

       The _Exit() and _exit() functions shall not call functions
       registered with atexit() nor any registered signal handlers.
       Open streams shall not be flushed.  Whether open streams are
       closed (without flushing) is implementation-defined. Finally, the
       calling process shall be terminated with the consequences
       described below.

   Consequences of Process Termination
       Process termination caused by any reason shall have the following
       consequences:

       Note:  These consequences are all extensions to the ISO C
              standard and are not further CX shaded. However,
              functionality relating to the XSI option is shaded.

        *  All of the file descriptors, directory streams, conversion
           descriptors, and message catalog descriptors open in the
           calling process shall be closed.

        *  If the parent process of the calling process has set its
           SA_NOCLDWAIT flag or has set the action for the SIGCHLD
           signal to SIG_IGN:

           --  The process' status information (see Section 2.13, Status
               Information), if any, shall be discarded.

           --  The lifetime of the calling process shall end
               immediately. If SA_NOCLDWAIT is set, it is
               implementation-defined whether a SIGCHLD signal is sent
               to the parent process.

           --  If a thread in the parent process of the calling process
               is blocked in wait(), waitpid(), or waitid(), and the
               parent process has no remaining child processes in the
               set of waited-for children, the wait(), waitid(), or
               waitpid() function shall fail and set errno to [ECHILD].

           Otherwise:

           --  Status information (see Section 2.13, Status Information)
               shall be generated.

           --  The calling process shall be transformed into a zombie
               process. Its status information shall be made available
               to the parent process until the process' lifetime ends.

           --  The process' lifetime shall end once its parent obtains
               the process' status information via a currently-blocked
               or future call to wait(), waitid() (without WNOWAIT), or
               waitpid().

           --  If one or more threads in the parent process of the
               calling process is blocked in a call to wait(), waitid(),
               or waitpid() awaiting termination of the process, one
               (or, if any are calling waitid() with WNOWAIT, possibly
               more) of these threads shall obtain the process' status
               information as specified in Section 2.13, Status
               Information and become unblocked.

           --  A SIGCHLD shall be sent to the parent process.

        *  Termination of a process does not directly terminate its
           children.  The sending of a SIGHUP signal as described below
           indirectly terminates children in some circumstances.

        *  The parent process ID of all of the existing child processes
           and zombie processes of the calling process shall be set to
           the process ID of an implementation-defined system process.
           That is, these processes shall be inherited by a special
           system process.

        *  Each attached shared-memory segment is detached and the value
           of shm_nattch (see shmget()) in the data structure associated
           with its shared memory ID shall be decremented by 1.

        *  For each semaphore for which the calling process has set a
           semadj value (see semop()), that value shall be added to the
           semval of the specified semaphore.

        *  If the process is a controlling process, the SIGHUP signal
           shall be sent to each process in the foreground process group
           of the controlling terminal belonging to the calling process.

        *  If the process is a controlling process, the controlling
           terminal associated with the session shall be disassociated
           from the session, allowing it to be acquired by a new
           controlling process.

        *  If the exit of the process causes a process group to become
           orphaned, and if any member of the newly-orphaned process
           group is stopped, then a SIGHUP signal followed by a SIGCONT
           signal shall be sent to each process in the newly-orphaned
           process group.

        *  All open named semaphores in the calling process shall be
           closed as if by appropriate calls to sem_close().

        *  Any memory locks established by the process via calls to
           mlockall() or mlock() shall be removed. If locked pages in
           the address space of the calling process are also mapped into
           the address spaces of other processes and are locked by those
           processes, the locks established by the other processes shall
           be unaffected by the call by this process to _Exit() or
           _exit().

        *  Memory mappings that were created in the process shall be
           unmapped before the process is destroyed.

        *  Any blocks of typed memory that were mapped in the calling
           process shall be unmapped, as if munmap() was implicitly
           called to unmap them.

        *  All open message queue descriptors in the calling process
           shall be closed as if by appropriate calls to mq_close().

        *  Any outstanding cancelable asynchronous I/O operations may be
           canceled. Those asynchronous I/O operations that are not
           canceled shall complete as if the _Exit() or _exit()
           operation had not yet occurred, but any associated signal
           notifications shall be suppressed. The _Exit() or _exit()
           operation may block awaiting such I/O completion. Whether any
           I/O is canceled, and which I/O may be canceled upon _Exit()
           or _exit(), is implementation-defined.

        *  Threads terminated by a call to _Exit() or _exit() shall not
           invoke their cancellation cleanup handlers or per-thread data
           destructors.

        *  If the calling process is a trace controller process, any
           trace streams that were created by the calling process shall
           be shut down as described by the posix_trace_shutdown()
           function, and mapping of trace event names to trace event
           type identifiers of any process built for these trace streams
           may be deallocated.

RETURN VALUE         top

       These functions do not return.

ERRORS         top

       No errors are defined.

       The following sections are informative.

EXAMPLES         top

       None.

APPLICATION USAGE         top

       Normally applications should use exit() rather than _Exit() or
       _exit().

RATIONALE         top

   Process Termination
       Early proposals drew a distinction between normal and abnormal
       process termination. Abnormal termination was caused only by
       certain signals and resulted in implementation-defined
       ``actions'', as discussed below.  Subsequent proposals
       distinguished three types of termination: normal termination (as
       in the current specification), simple abnormal termination, and
       abnormal termination with actions.  Again the distinction between
       the two types of abnormal termination was that they were caused
       by different signals and that implementation-defined actions
       would result in the latter case. Given that these actions were
       completely implementation-defined, the early proposals were only
       saying when the actions could occur and how their occurrence
       could be detected, but not what they were. This was of little or
       no use to conforming applications, and thus the distinction is
       not made in this volume of POSIX.1‐2017.

       The implementation-defined actions usually include, in most
       historical implementations, the creation of a file named core in
       the current working directory of the process. This file contains
       an image of the memory of the process, together with descriptive
       information about the process, perhaps sufficient to reconstruct
       the state of the process at the receipt of the signal.

       There is a potential security problem in creating a core file if
       the process was set-user-ID and the current user is not the owner
       of the program, if the process was set-group-ID and none of the
       user's groups match the group of the program, or if the user does
       not have permission to write in the current directory. In this
       situation, an implementation either should not create a core file
       or should make it unreadable by the user.

       Despite the silence of this volume of POSIX.1‐2017 on this
       feature, applications are advised not to create files named core
       because of potential conflicts in many implementations. Some
       implementations use a name other than core for the file; for
       example, by appending the process ID to the filename.

   Terminating a Process
       It is important that the consequences of process termination as
       described occur regardless of whether the process called _exit()
       (perhaps indirectly through exit()) or instead was terminated due
       to a signal or for some other reason.  Note that in the specific
       case of exit() this means that the status argument to exit() is
       treated in the same way as the status argument to _exit().

       A language other than C may have other termination primitives
       than the C-language exit() function, and programs written in such
       a language should use its native termination primitives, but
       those should have as part of their function the behavior of
       _exit() as described. Implementations in languages other than C
       are outside the scope of this version of this volume of
       POSIX.1‐2017, however.

       As required by the ISO C standard, using return from main() has
       the same behavior (other than with respect to language scope
       issues) as calling exit() with the returned value. Reaching the
       end of the main() function has the same behavior as calling
       exit(0).

       A value of zero (or EXIT_SUCCESS, which is required to be zero)
       for the argument status conventionally indicates successful
       termination. This corresponds to the specification for exit() in
       the ISO C standard. The convention is followed by utilities such
       as make and various shells, which interpret a zero status from a
       child process as success. For this reason, applications should
       not call exit(0) or _exit(0) when they terminate unsuccessfully;
       for example, in signal-catching functions.

       Historically, the implementation-defined process that inherits
       children whose parents have terminated without waiting on them is
       called init and has a process ID of 1.

       The sending of a SIGHUP to the foreground process group when a
       controlling process terminates corresponds to somewhat different
       historical implementations. In System V, the kernel sends a
       SIGHUP on termination of (essentially) a controlling process. In
       4.2 BSD, the kernel does not send SIGHUP in a case like this, but
       the termination of a controlling process is usually noticed by a
       system daemon, which arranges to send a SIGHUP to the foreground
       process group with the vhangup() function. However, in 4.2 BSD,
       due to the behavior of the shells that support job control, the
       controlling process is usually a shell with no other processes in
       its process group. Thus, a change to make _exit() behave this way
       in such systems should not cause problems with existing
       applications.

       The termination of a process may cause a process group to become
       orphaned in either of two ways.  The connection of a process
       group to its parent(s) outside of the group depends on both the
       parents and their children. Thus, a process group may be orphaned
       by the termination of the last connecting parent process outside
       of the group or by the termination of the last direct descendant
       of the parent process(es). In either case, if the termination of
       a process causes a process group to become orphaned, processes
       within the group are disconnected from their job control shell,
       which no longer has any information on the existence of the
       process group. Stopped processes within the group would languish
       forever. In order to avoid this problem, newly orphaned process
       groups that contain stopped processes are sent a SIGHUP signal
       and a SIGCONT signal to indicate that they have been disconnected
       from their session.  The SIGHUP signal causes the process group
       members to terminate unless they are catching or ignoring SIGHUP.
       Under most circumstances, all of the members of the process group
       are stopped if any of them are stopped.

       The action of sending a SIGHUP and a SIGCONT signal to members of
       a newly orphaned process group is similar to the action of 4.2
       BSD, which sends SIGHUP and SIGCONT to each stopped child of an
       exiting process.  If such children exit in response to the
       SIGHUP, any additional descendants receive similar treatment at
       that time. In this volume of POSIX.1‐2017, the signals are sent
       to the entire process group at the same time. Also, in this
       volume of POSIX.1‐2017, but not in 4.2 BSD, stopped processes may
       be orphaned, but may be members of a process group that is not
       orphaned; therefore, the action taken at _exit() must consider
       processes other than child processes.

       It is possible for a process group to be orphaned by a call to
       setpgid() or setsid(), as well as by process termination. This
       volume of POSIX.1‐2017 does not require sending SIGHUP and
       SIGCONT in those cases, because, unlike process termination,
       those cases are not caused accidentally by applications that are
       unaware of job control. An implementation can choose to send
       SIGHUP and SIGCONT in those cases as an extension; such an
       extension must be documented as required in <signal.h>.

       The ISO/IEC 9899:1999 standard adds the _Exit() function that
       results in immediate program termination without triggering
       signals or atexit()-registered functions. In POSIX.1‐2008, this
       is equivalent to the _exit() function.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS         top

       None.

SEE ALSO         top

       atexit(3p), exit(3p), mlock(3p), mlockall(3p), mq_close(3p),
       munmap(3p), posix_trace_create(3p), sem_close(3p), semop(3p),
       setpgid(3p), setsid(3p), shmget(3p), wait(3p), waitid(3p)

       The Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, stdlib.h(0p),
       unistd.h(0p)

COPYRIGHT         top

       Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic
       form from IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, Standard for Information
       Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The
       Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, 2018 Edition, Copyright
       (C) 2018 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
       Engineers, Inc and The Open Group.  In the event of any
       discrepancy between this version and the original IEEE and The
       Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group
       Standard is the referee document. The original Standard can be
       obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html .

       Any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page
       are most likely to have been introduced during the conversion of
       the source files to man page format. To report such errors, see
       https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html .

IEEE/The Open Group               2017                         _EXIT(3P)

Pages that refer to this page: stdlib.h(0p)unistd.h(0p)exit(3p)sigaction(3p)