12.7 Error Handling

Erlang has a built-in feature for error handling between processes. Terminating processes emit exit signals to all linked processes, which can terminate as well or handle the exit in some way. This feature can be used to build hierarchical program structures where some processes are supervising other processes, for example, restarting them if they terminate abnormally.

See OTP Design Principles for more information about OTP supervision trees, which use this feature.

Emitting Exit Signals

When a process terminates, it terminates with an exit reason as explained in Process Termination. This exit reason is emitted in an exit signal to all linked processes.

A process can also call the function exit(Pid,Reason). This results in an exit signal with exit reason Reason being emitted to Pid, but does not affect the calling process.

Receiving Exit Signals

The default behaviour when a process receives an exit signal with an exit reason other than normal, is to terminate and in turn emit exit signals with the same exit reason to its linked processes. An exit signal with reason normal is ignored.

A process can be set to trap exit signals by calling:

process_flag(trap_exit, true)

When a process is trapping exits, it does not terminate when an exit signal is received. Instead, the signal is transformed into a message {'EXIT',FromPid,Reason}, which is put into the mailbox of the process, just like a regular message.

An exception to the above is if the exit reason is kill, that is if exit(Pid,kill) has been called. This unconditionally terminates the process, regardless of if it is trapping exit signals.