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25.7.5 Termination Internals

The _exit function is the primitive used for process termination by exit. It is declared in the header file unistd.h.

— Function: void _exit (int status)

The _exit function is the primitive for causing a process to terminate with status status. Calling this function does not execute cleanup functions registered with atexit or on_exit.

— Function: void _Exit (int status)

The _Exit function is the ISO C equivalent to _exit. The ISO C committee members were not sure whether the definitions of _exit and _Exit were compatible so they have not used the POSIX name.

This function was introduced in ISO C99 and is declared in stdlib.h.

When a process terminates for any reason—either because the program terminates, or as a result of a signal—the following things happen: