Subj : exit v. exit_group
To   : comp.programming.threads
From : Bluejack
Date : Thu Mar 03 2005 03:37 pm


Hmmm.

I am a little confusion about exit() under NPTL.

exit() seems to detach and terminate the thread, as per Ulrich Drepper's
document, but what does this mean for the standard C function exit() that
is supposed to terminate an application?

Now, exit_group() is described as the right way to terminate all threads;
but my distribution (Debian Sarge w/ 2.6 (2.6.8) kernel) does not seem
to have an exit_group() function.

Questions:

A) Is exit_group() really the multi-threaded replacement for exit() ?

A.1) Why choose this mechanism rather than keep exit() as a 'terminate
the whole application' mechanism, and let developers call the pthread
facilities for exiting a thread?

B) Is my distribution simply missing something (it has a man page for
exit_group(), which indicates #include <linux/unistd.h> as the
source, but that include does not give me a prototype, nor does
linking find the symbol) -- or am I probably doing something stupid?

Thoughts/advice welcome.

-Blunt Jackson

PS. direct email welcome, but do the right thing with my email address,  
nat.

.