The Linux Programming Interface

25PROCESS TERMINATION

This chapter describes what happens when a process terminates. We begin by describing the use of exit() and _exit() to terminate a process. We then discuss the use of exit handlers to automatically perform cleanups when a process calls exit(). We conclude by considering some interactions between fork(), stdio buffers, and exit().

25.1 Terminating a Process: _exit() and exit()

A process may terminate in two general ways. One of these is abnormal termination, caused by the delivery of a signal whose default action is to terminate the process (with or without a core dump), as described in Section 20.1. Alternatively, a process can terminate normally, using the _exit() system call.

#include <unistd.h>void _exit(int status