Abnormal termination is an unexpected end of a functioning computer program caused by memory or software code issues. The operating system steps in to mitigate the damage and frees up memory allocated to the program. The crash information is saved in the operating system crash logs.
An abnormal termination is a sudden and unexpected termination of a functioning computer program or application. Its name originally comes from the older IBM 360 operating system, which noted such terminations as ABEND errors. Abnormal termination of a program can occur for many different reasons, but the most common reasons involve problems with system memory or problems within the software code. When this type of termination occurs, the program closes itself, and the operating system steps in to mitigate the damage by flushing program memory and behaving as if the program closed properly in typical situations.
Problems within the system memory on a computer can trigger an abnormal termination of one or more programs on the system. When your computer allows a memory leak to occur—that is, when it allows a program to write to memory that hasn’t been assigned to it by the operating system—it can inadvertently overwrite parts of memory that belonged to another program. Once the invaded program will try to recover the information stored in the invaded memory sections, it will no longer find the correct and expected data. This mismatch often results in a complete crash of the application, since it cannot run using the overwritten information saved by the invading program.
Problems with the software code can sometimes cause a program to terminate abnormally. If the software is buggy or does not contain sufficient error-handling code, incorrect input from the end user can lead to an abnormal termination of the software. For example, a program that asks the end user to enter their phone number will usually be coded such that any non-numeric response that doesn’t contain 10 digits is immediately “caught” as a potential error and returned to the end user as a bad result. Immature or incomplete software that does not include this error-handling code may crash on receiving incorrect input; the program will not be able to cope if the end user decides to enter “abcdefg” as the assumed phone number.
Once an abend occurs, the operating system usually alerts the computer user that a program shutdown has occurred. After doing this, the operating system’s job is to recover from the crash without negatively affecting any of the other programs on the system. To do this, it typically frees up the memory it has allocated to the program, exactly as it would if the program had terminated successfully. Program crash information is often saved in the operating system crash logs, allowing the end user to review the crash information to look for a potential root cause of the conflict.
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