Question

I have some clean up in a terminate_handler and it is possible to throw an exception. Do I need to worry about catching it to prevent recursive calls to the terminate_handler? With gcc, it seems this can’t happen and we just go into abort. Is that true of the standard or is the behavior undefined?

Answer 1

A terminate handler is not allowed to return (§18.6.​3.1/2); it must end the program (the default handler calls abort()). If it consisted of:

void my_terminate()
{
    throw 5;
}

You’d get undefined behavior, because you would leave the function (because the exception propagates) without having terminated the program. So if you have code that could throw, make sure you catch all exceptions, like this:

void my_terminate()
{
    try
    {
        // stuff
    }
    catch(...)
    {
        // too bad
    }

    abort();
}

However (to answer the title question), I don’t see anything that restricts it from being entered again, so this should be technically be fine:

void my_terminate()
{
    static int counter = 0;

    if (counter++ < 5)
        terminate();

    abort();
}