gwk, I absolutely agree; at this point that's the main thing I'm looking for.

But it would be great if whoever adds that documentation could include the rationale for this behavior too.  It still seems "obvious" to me that it should change the exit code, and every time I bump into this behavior I am freshly confused and have to re-read these bugs.  If I had a better intuition for what the error-handling *model* of atexit was, I think it might stick to memory a bit better.