sys.exit and exceptions (newbie question)

[Ben Hutchings]

victor at prodigy.net (Victor Muslin) writes:

> What is a pythonic idiom for forcing an immediate program termination?
> sys.exit() does not do it, because it throws a SystemExit exception,
> so if it is called within a try block, a generic except block is still
> executed.

I'm not sure that there is a Pythonic idiom for forcing immediate
termination, since Python (a) has a pretty good exception system and
(b) does not allow you to get into the sort of mess that you can do
with C, where a clean exit becomes impossible.

An except block that catches all exceptions should always re-raise the
exceptioneal with.  If it fails to re-raise
KeyboardInterrupt, for example, the program won't be interruptible by
the user.  In the more general case, failing to re-raise exceptions
can be a good way to hide bugs.

You may find the os.abort() or the os._exit() function useful.

-- 
Any opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of Roundpoint.