Question

I was under the impression that any function in C would support only one return statement until I came across a few notes where there was a mention of multiple return statements. How do these multiple return statements work?

Answer 1

The first return statement that is executed will terminate the function and its value will be used.

However, there can obviously be multiple execution paths – and they can return different values. Actually in a non-void function every possible execution path has to return something. The easiest way to achieve this is obviously having a return statement at the very end of the function.

if(foo)
    return 23;
else
    return 42;

There are some arguments for having just a single return statement in your code; consider reading the article if any of them apply to you. A good example is code that always needs to do some clean-up. In this case you will only want to return after this has been done – so you’ll set a variable for the return value and use goto to jump to the cleanup-and-return section at the end of the function if you need to return early.