Skip to main content

38.11 Querying Before Exit

When Emacs exits, it terminates all its subprocesses. For subprocesses that run a program, it sends them the SIGHUP signal; connections are simply closed. Because subprocesses may be doing valuable work, Emacs normally asks the user to confirm that it is ok to terminate them. Each process has a query flag, which, if non-nil, says that Emacs should ask for confirmation before exiting and thus killing that process. The default for the query flag is t, meaning do query.

function process-query-on-exit-flag process​

This returns the query flag of process.

function set-process-query-on-exit-flag process flag​

This function sets the query flag of process to flag. It returns flag.

Here is an example of using set-process-query-on-exit-flag on a shell process to avoid querying:

(set-process-query-on-exit-flag (get-process "shell") nil)
     ⇒ nil

user option confirm-kill-processes​

If this user option is set to t (the default), then Emacs asks for confirmation before killing processes on exit. If it is nil, Emacs kills processes without confirmation, i.e., the query flag of all processes is ignored.