detect program termination (C, Windows)

Question

I have a program that has to perform certain tasks before it finishes. The problem is that sometimes the program crashes with an exception (like database cannot be reached, etc). Now, is there any way to detect an abnormal termination and execute some code before it dies?

Thanks.

code is appreciated.

Answer 1

1. Win32

The Win32 API contains a way to do this via the SetUnhandledExceptionFilter function, as follows:

LONG myFunc(LPEXCEPTION_POINTERS p)
{
     printf("Exception!!!\n");     
     return EXCEPTION_EXECUTE_HANDLER;
}

int main()
{
     SetUnhandledExceptionFilter((LPTOP_LEVEL_EXCEPTION_FILTER)&myFunc);    
     // generate an exception !
     int x = 0;
     int y = 1/x;
     return 0;
}

2. POSIX/Linux

I usually do this via the signal() function and then handle the SIGSEGV signal appropriately. You can also handle the SIGTERM signal and SIGINT, but not SIGKILL (by design). You can use strace() to get a backtrace to see what caused the signal.