Difference between Environment.Exit and simple return 2 from Main

Question

From outside of the application, is there any difference between

...
Environment.Exit(2)

and

static int Main()
{
    ...
    re         


        

Answer 1

Environment.Exit(2) can be used everywhere. return 2 only within the Main() function.

Answer 2

The most obvious difference is that you can call Environment.Exit from anywhere in your code. Aside from that:

• Main finishing won't terminate the process if there are other foreground threads executing; Environment.Exit will take down the process anyway.
• Environment.Exit terminates the process without unwinding the stack and executing finally blocks (at least according to my experiments). Obviously when you return from Main you're already at the top level as far as managed code is concerned.
• Both give finalizers a chance to execute before the process really shuts down
• Environment.Exit demands the appropriate security permission, so won't work for less trusted apps.

Having seen the question update, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. In both cases the process will just exit with a code of 2...

Answer 3

If you are doing a Unit Test and calling Main

Program.Main(args);

then Environment.exit will always reflect a failure. Where as using return will work as expect.