One thing you’ll need to be careful of when using exit is to make sure you do any necessary cleanup before the program exits. Most of the time, no explicit cleanup is needed. However, it’s probably a good idea to close any open file handles, network sockets, etc… before exiting. Note that destructors to in-scope variables will not be called before the program exits.

if (bIsError1)
    exit(-1);

As opposed to using a standard “return” type of statement:

if (bIsError2)
    return -1;

I’m sure I have written and compiled code before that has multiple return statements, to be executed under various conditions, within the same main(). Is there a reason to favor one type of statement over the other?

UPDATE: I may have partially answered my own question. If exit() is called within a function other than main() does the program terminate outright rather than returning control to main()? Side-effects? Any other reasons to use, or not use, exit()?

Loops

A loop causes the program to repeatedly execute a series of statements until a given condition is true.