What happens to '0'??? Solved/Closed

Question

Hello,
I have been wondering for a long time about the return statement in the c-programming. Now consider the following code....

int main()
{
 .............
 return(0);
}

I would like to know where does the value zero(0) go???

Any function's return statement will return the value to it's calling function. Then what is it for main()???

have a gr8 day
bye tc

crazy_devil · Answer

lol Thats like chinese to me ^^ 

Soory cant help this hehee

Take care darani ;0P

kilian · Answer

Hi!

Under Unix/Linux it is returned to the parent process ;-)
The return of the main is the "exit code".
It is sometimes important to determine if a child executed itself as it wanted to.
As an example, consider a shell under Linux. When an application is launched by the shell, the shell becomes the parent process, and the application launched is the child.

In this configuration, the shell will wait for the end of its child. If it terminated correctly , it will return a value (the return of the main or the value of exit if the exit function was used). And the parent (the shell) will be able able to read the exit status.

darani · Answer

thnx frnd...
the answer was very useful...

if it is in other platform then????
say like windows, etc....

kilian · Answer

Under Windows it is a bit different. the standard entrypoint of a windows based program is the WinMain function. As you can see, its parameters are a bit different and it's the same for its return value.

You can use the main() under windows but I guess that the compiler build itself a WinMain function that calls your main() function.

And what happens to the WinMain return value?

For example when you kill yourself a process with TerminateProcess you can examine its return code with GetExitCodeProcess to know how it terminated :-)

kilian · Answer

And under Mac Os X it is the same as in Linux, because they are both Unix-like systems.

darani · Answer

Thnx frnd...
lot to know from u...

have a gr8 day
bye tc

What happens to '0'???

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