I'm a little confused on the way Linux (or UNIX in general) handles exception handling. I tried searching the forum and on Google for these different ways of exception handling. I was able to find out what they were but I couldn't seem to find a straight forward explanation on how they differed from each other and when to use one method over another. Thank you in advanced for your help.

• What is the difference between terminating my program with return, exit, or abort?
• Which should I use and when (if it matters)?
• How should I use it? What is the "standard" way of doing doing it. Should I use exit(1), exit(-1), exit(EXIT_FAILURE), exit(EXIT_SUCCESS), or what?
• How does strerr differ from stdout? From what I understand, by separating these two kinds of output I can control how it is used when I pipe it to another command or use cat on it. Are there any other uses?

There are defacto standards. When a program runs with no error it should return a zero - exit(EXIT_SUCCESS) or return 0; These two accomplish the same thing - return (or return EXIT_SUCCESS) is normally found in main().

sysexits.h (if it is on your system) defines other exit codes that are standard.
Basically any positive number your shell can interpret means error return.
Exitinf from main() you can use return 1 or return EXIT_FAILURE; To exit in the middle of code call exit() with EXIT_FAILURE) or one of the sysexits.h codes

Bailing out with abort() usually causes a core dump which is messy for production but useful in testing. abort() sends a SIGABRT to the process.

There are three per-process file descriptors (in this case a FILE * struct pointing to a stream) defined for a process by default. They don't have to exist because you can close them (daemons do this ) but most times they are there:

stdin (input usually a tty),
stdout - the expected normal output stream,
stderr the standard error output stream.

Yes, in a decent UNIX console app like tr or col, you should expect that:
all error messages go to stderr,
any input data can be read from stdin, or from optional input files,
results go to stdout