Erlang: invoking erl -eval from command line never exits

Question

I have a simple Erlang command that I want to invoke via erl -eval (to compile erlydtl template, as described on erlydtl page).

When I do it interactively from shell everything works fine and the command exits immediately:

erl -pa ebin deps\erlydtl\ebin Eshell V5.9.3.1  (abort with ^G) 
1> erlydtl:compile('templates/tictactoe.dtl',tictactoe_dtl,[{out_dir,'ebin'}]).
ok

But when I try to do it via erl -eval (I want to run this from .bat file):

erl -pa ebin deps\erlydtl\ebin -noshell -eval erlydtl:compile('templates/tictactoe.dtl',tictactoe_dtl,[{out_dir,'ebin'}])

Then the command does its job (template is compiled) but it doesn't exit and I need to kill the shell process manually with ctrl+c (I'm working under Windows).

I just want the command to compile the template and exit. What may be the problem?

Update:

One solution may be appending exit() invocation at the end of command, but then I end up with following:

erl -pa ebin deps\erlydtl\ebin -noshell -eval erlydtl:compile('templates/tictactoe.dtl',tictactoe_dtl,[{out_dir,'ebin'}]),exit(success).
{"init terminating in do_boot",success}

Crash dump was written to: erl_crash.dump
init terminating in do_boot (success)

The error message is very irritating, so I still don't like this solution.

Answer 1

This should do the trick

erl -noshell -eval 'c:ls()' -eval 'init:stop()'

You have to tell the vm to shut down.

Answer 2

you need to specify -noshell and invoke halt() at the end. For instance

erl -noshell -eval "erlydtl:compile('templates/tictactoe.dtl',tictactoe_dtl,[{out_dir,'ebin'}]),halt()."