Well, those special functions were kind of useful when you only accessed your game through Lowser. I always shared this information back when I experimented with it, but nobody else seemed to have believed me, or at least, nobody passed it on when this question popped up (which it did and does often):
The command os.exit() only worked with earlier versions of Luaplayer. I know for a fact it worked with 0.16, and that it did NOT with 0.20. I believe I tested it with 0.19 and it did not work on that version, but I don't remember for sure.
If you want to use 0.20 (which is understandable since it uses a more updated version of Lua), then I believe Cools' mods of LuaPlayer include the function System.Quit(). I know the function was in LuaPlayer 0.17dk2, but I'm pretty sure Cools integrated it into his (or made his own).
i have used and still do use System.Quit without lowser.