Important Notice

The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

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     If the program is returning to COMMAND.COM, control transfers to
     the resident portion, and the transient portion is reloaded if
     necessary. If a batch file is in progress, the next line of the
     file is fetched and interpreted; otherwise, a prompt is issued for
     the next user command.
 
     MS-DOS then takes the following actions:
 
        ■ All memory belonging to the process is released.
 
        ■ File buffers are flushed, and any open handles for files or
          devices owned by the process are closed.
 
        ■ The termination handler vector (Int 22h) is restored
          from PSP:000Ah.
 
        ■ The CTRL+C handler vector (Int 23h) is restored from
          PSP:000Eh.
 
        ■ The critical-error handler vector (Int 24h) is restored
          from PSP:0012h (MS-DOS versions 2.0 and later).
 
        ■ Control is transferred to the termination handler.
 
     Any files that have been written to using FCBs should be closed
     before performing this exit call; otherwise, data may be lost.
 
     Other methods of performing a final exit are Int 21h Function 00h,
     Int 21h Function 31h, Int 21h Function 4Ch, and Int 27h.
 
     If the program is running on a network, it should remove all locks
     it has placed on file regions before terminating.
 
     Int 21h Functions 31h and 4Ch are the preferred method for
     termination because they allow a return code to be passed to the
     parent process.
                                    -♦-