|
PROLOG | NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | EXAMPLES | APPLICATION USAGE | RATIONALE | FUTURE DIRECTIONS | SEE ALSO | COPYRIGHT |
_EXIT(3P) POSIX Programmer's Manual _EXIT(3P)
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.
_Exit, _exit — terminate a process
#include <stdlib.h>
void _Exit(int status);
#include <unistd.h>
void _exit(int status);
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.1‐2008 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 to a waiting parent process.
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 is executing a
wait(), waitid(), or waitpid(), and has neither set its
SA_NOCLDWAIT flag nor set SIGCHLD to SIG_IGN, it shall be
notified of termination of the calling process and the low-order
eight bits (that is, bits 0377) of status shall be made available
to it. If the parent is not waiting, the child's status shall be
made available to it when the parent subsequently executes
wait(), waitid(), or waitpid().
The semantics of the waitid() function shall be equivalent to
wait().
* If the parent process of the calling process is not executing a
wait(), waitid(), or waitpid(), and has neither set its
SA_NOCLDWAIT flag nor set SIGCHLD to SIG_IGN, the calling process
shall be transformed into a zombie process. A zombie process is
an inactive process and it shall be deleted at some later time
when its parent process executes wait(), waitid(), or waitpid().
The semantics of the waitid() function shall be equivalent to
wait().
* 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.
* Either:
If the implementation supports the SIGCHLD signal, a SIGCHLD
shall be sent to the parent process.
Or:
If the parent process has set its SA_NOCLDWAIT flag, or set
SIGCHLD to SIG_IGN, the status shall be discarded, and 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.
* 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.
These functions do not return.
No errors are defined.
The following sections are informative.
None.
Normally applications should use exit() rather than _Exit() or
_exit().
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.1‐2008.
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.1‐2008 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.1‐2008, 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.1‐2008, the signals are sent to the entire
process group at the same time. Also, in this volume of POSIX.1‐2008,
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.1‐2008 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.
None.
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.1‐2008, stdlib.h(0p),
unistd.h(0p)
Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form
from IEEE Std 1003.1, 2013 Edition, Standard for Information
Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The Open
Group Base Specifications Issue 7, Copyright (C) 2013 by the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open
Group. (This is POSIX.1-2008 with the 2013 Technical Corrigendum 1
applied.) 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.unix.org/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 2013 _EXIT(3P)
Pages that refer to this page: stdlib.h(0p), unistd.h(0p), exit(3p)