PROLOG¶

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¶

exit — cause the shell to exit

SYNOPSIS¶

exit [n]

DESCRIPTION¶

The exit utility shall cause the shell to exit from its current execution environment with the exit status specified by the unsigned decimal integer n. If the current execution environment is a subshell environment, the shell shall exit from the subshell environment with the specified exit status and continue in the environment from which that subshell environment was invoked; otherwise, the shell utility shall terminate with the specified exit status. If n is specified, but its value is not between 0 and 255 inclusively, the exit status is undefined.

A trap on EXIT shall be executed before the shell terminates, except when the exit utility is invoked in that trap itself, in which case the shell shall exit immediately.

OPTIONS¶

None.

OPERANDS¶

See the DESCRIPTION.

STDIN¶

Not used.

INPUT FILES¶

None.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES¶

None.

ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS¶

Default.

STDOUT¶

Not used.

STDERR¶

The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.

OUTPUT FILES¶

None.

EXTENDED DESCRIPTION¶

None.

EXIT STATUS¶

The exit status shall be n, if specified, except that the behavior is unspecified if n is not an unsigned decimal integer or is greater than 255. Otherwise, the value shall be the exit value of the last command executed, or zero if no command was executed. When exit is executed in a trap action, the last command is considered to be the command that executed immediately preceding the trap action.

CONSEQUENCES OF ERRORS¶

Default.

The following sections are informative.

APPLICATION USAGE¶

None.

EXAMPLES¶

Exit with a true value:

exit 0

Exit with a false value:

exit 1

Propagate error handling from within a subshell:

(


    command1 || exit 1


    command2 || exit 1


    exec command3
) > outputfile || exit 1
echo "outputfile created successfully"

RATIONALE¶

As explained in other sections, certain exit status values have been reserved for special uses and should be used by applications only for those purposes:

 126

A file to be executed was found, but it was not an executable utility.

 127

A utility to be executed was not found.

>128

A command was interrupted by a signal.

The behavior of exit when given an invalid argument or unknown option is unspecified, because of differing practices in the various historical implementations. A value larger than 255 might be truncated by the shell, and be unavailable even to a parent process that uses waitid() to get the full exit value. It is recommended that implementations that detect any usage error should cause a non-zero exit status (or, if the shell is interactive and the error does not cause the shell to abort, store a non-zero value in "$?"), but even this was not done historically in all shells.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS¶

None.

SEE ALSO¶

Section 2.14, Special Built-In Utilities

COPYRIGHT¶

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 .