1.1.13.1 End Application

• exit( status ) terminates the process normally. a status value of 0 or EXIT_SUCCESS indicates success, and any other value or the constant EXIT_FAILURE is used to indicate an error. exit() performs following operations. 1) Flushes unwritten buffered data. 2) Closes all open files. 3) Removes temporary files.
• Abort will not do as much as exit, but using abort will dump core, if the user has core dumps enabled. So as a rule of thumb, I’d use abort if you’re so unsure about what’s gone wrong that the only way to get useful information about it is by analysing a core dump.
• assert just call abort.
• std::terminate is what is automatically called in a C++ program when there is an unhandled exception. This is essentially the C++ equivalent to abort, assuming that you are reporting all your exceptional errors by means of throwing exceptions. This calls a handler that is set by the std::set_terminate function, which by default simply calls abort.
• Catch the exceptions you can’t handle in main() and simply return from there. This means that you are guaranteed that stack unwinding happens correctly and all destructors are called.
  int main() { 
      try { 
         // your stuff 
      } 
      catch( ... ) { 
         return -1;    // or whatever 
      } 
  }