Exit (system call)

On many computer operating systems, a computer process terminates its execution by making an exit system call. More generally, an exit in a multithreading environment means that a thread of execution has stopped running. For resource management, the operating system reclaims resources (memory, , etc.) that were used by the process. The process is said to be a dead process after it terminates. Under Unix and Unix-like operating systems, a process is started when its parent process executes a fork system call. The parent process may then wait for the child process to terminate, or may continue execution (possibly forking off other child processes). When the child process terminates ("dies"), either normally by calling exit, or abnormally due to a fatal exception or signal (e.g., SIGTERM, SIGINT, SIGKILL), an exit status is returned to the operating system and a SIGCHLD signal is sent to the parent process. The exit status can then be retrieved by the parent process via the wait system call. Most operating systems allow the terminating process to provide a specific exit status to the system, which is made available to the parent process. Typically this is an integer value, although some operating systems (e.g., Plan 9 from Bell Labs) allow a character string to be returned. Systems returning an integer value commonly use a zero value to indicate successful execution and non-zero values to indicate error conditions. Other systems (e.g., OpenVMS) use even-numbered values for success and odd values for errors. Still other systems (e.g., IBM z/OS and its predecessors) use ranges of integer values to indicate success, warning, and error completion results. The exit operation typically performs clean-up operations within the process space before returning control back to the operating system. Some systems and programming languages allow user subroutines to be registered so that they are invoked at program termination before the process actually terminates for good.