Does exception handling exist in any UNIX enviornment? I develop on Windows MSVC++ land and need to port to UNIX.
Not exactly. The NT family of OSes throw exceptions which are handled by an exception vector. You can throw exceptions -- in the sense of software error trapping in Unix -- using C++ as well. It's no different from MSVC++ in that regard.
Unix creates signals - think of them as exactly like software interrupts -- to handle exceptions. This is not like the Windows message pump.
These signals are sent to a process, which then has a signal handler. It's like an exception vector (table) except that it's a single function that processes signals or lets them through.
On a Unix box, type "man signal" and it will explain a little bit about signal processing.
Here is a site with PDF's that go into some depth (it's for linux, which for signals, is just fine):
www.advancedlinuxprogramming.com
It's a whole book. You're gonna need it. If you're going to non-Linux, try Richard Stevens book 'Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment'.
Good Luck---
The thing that's going to kill you is that NT(XP) was built from the ground up on threading. Unix was not.
pthreads are supported just fine in most Unix versions, and work well.