12.4 Process Termination

When a process terminates, it always terminates with an exit reason. The reason can be any term.

A process is said to terminate normally, if the exit reason is the atom normal. A process with no more code to execute terminates normally.

A process terminates with an exit reason {Reason,Stack} when a run-time error occurs. See Exit Reasons.

A process can terminate itself by calling one of the following BIFs:

• exit(Reason)
• erlang:error(Reason)
• erlang:error(Reason, Args)The process then terminates with reason Reason for exit/1 or {Reason,Stack} for the others.

A process can also be terminated if it receives an exit signal with another exit reason than normal, see Error Handling.