It is commonly used in fork-ed child code, where the child must not go on to execute parent code. The alternative is exec.

The ability to set exit status, as you do, is a good diagnostic tool. I'm not sure what you expected your code to do. The behavior seems correct and unsurprising to me. An exit call clearly never returns, so the innermost one gets to set the exit status.

You've raised my curiosity, I never thought to check behavior of multiple END blocks under a construction like this.

After Compline,
Zaxo