When should we call System.exit in Java

Question

In Java, What is the difference with or without System.exit(0) in following code?

public class TestExit
{      
    public static void main(String[] args)
    { 
        System.out.println("hello world");

        System.exit(0);  // is it necessary? And when it must be called? 
    }      
}

The document says: "This method never returns normally." What does it mean?

Answer 1

System.exit is needed

• when you want to return a non-0 error code
• when you want to exit your program from somewhere that isn't main()

In your case, it does the exact same thing as the simple return-from-main.

Answer 2

System.exit() can be used to run shutdown hooks before the program quits. This is a convenient way to handle shutdown in bigger programs, where all parts of the program can't (and shouldn't) be aware of each other. Then, if someone wants to quit, he can simply call System.exit(), and the shutdown hooks (if properly set up) take care of doing all necessary shutdown ceremonies such as closing files, releasing resources etc.

"This method never returns normally." means just that the method won't return; once a thread goes there, it won't come back.

Another, maybe more common, way to quit a program is to simply to reach the end of the main method. But if there are any non-daemon threads running, they will not be shut down and thus the JVM will not exit. Thus, if you have any such non-daemon threads, you need some other means (than the shutdown hooks) to shut down all non-daemon threads and release other resources. If there are no other non-daemon threads, returning from main will shut down the JVM and will call the shutdown hooks.

For some reason shutdown hooks seem to be an undervalued and misunderstood mechanism, and people are reinventing the wheel with all kind of proprietary custom hacks to quit their programs. I would encourage using shutdown hooks; it's all there in the standard Runtime that you'll be using anyway.

Answer 3

The method never returns because it's the end of the world and none of your code is going to be executed next.

Your application, in your example, would exit anyway at the same spot in the code, but, if you use System.exit. you have the option of returning a custom code to the enviroment, like, say

System.exit(42);

Who is going to make use of your exit code? A script that called the application. Works in Windows, Unix and all other scriptable environments.

Why return a code? To say things like "I did not succeed", "The database did not answer".

To see how to get the value od an exit code and use it in a unix shell script or windows cmd script, you might check this answer on this site

Answer 4

One should NEVER call System.exit(0).

1. It is a hidden "goto", and "gotos" breaks the control flow. Relying on hooks in this context is a mental mapping every developer in the team has to be aware of.
2. Quitting the program "normally" will provide the same exit code to the operating system as System.exit(0). So it is redundant. If your program cannot quit "normally", your development got out of control. You should have always full control of the system state.
3. You hide programming problems such as running threads that are not stopped normally.
4. This refers to 3.: You may encounter an inconstistent application state interrupting threads abnormally.

By the way: Returning other return codes than 0 does make sense if you want to indicate abnormal program termination.

Answer 5

Java Language Specification says that

Program Exit

A program terminates all its activity and exits when one of two things happens:

All the threads that are not daemon threads terminate.

Some thread invokes the exit method of class Runtime or class System, and the exit operation is not forbidden by the security manager.

It means that You should use it when You have big program (well, at lest bigger than this one) and want to finish its execution.

Answer 6

In that case, it's not needed. No extra threads will have been started up, you're not changing the exit code (which defaults to 0) - basically it's pointless.

When the docs say the method never returns normally, it means the subsequent line of code is effectively unreachable, even though the compiler doesn't know that:

System.exit(0);
System.out.println("This line will never be reached");

Either an exception will be thrown, or the VM will terminate before returning. It will never "just return".

It's very rare to be worth calling System.exit() IME. It can make sense if you're writing a command line tool, and you want to indicate an error via the exit code rather than just throwing an exception... but I can't remember the last time I used it in normal production code.