sys.exit and exceptions (newbie question)

[Thomas Wouters]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 05:18:38PM +0000, Victor Muslin wrote:

> 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. 

You can use sys._exit(). This exits in a very abortive way -- right away,
dropping everything it's doing, without doing any kind of cleanup. In
general it's better to avoid unqualified except: clauses, and avoid code
that uses it (unless, of course, they reraise the exception if they can't
handle it.)

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

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