Cleanup when a object dies

[Raymond Hettinger]

On Jan 22, 7:54 pm, Benjamin <musiccomposit... at gmail.com> wrote:
> I writing writing a class to allow settings (options, preferences) to
> written file in a cross platform manner. I'm unsure how to go a about
> syncing the data to disk. Of course, it's horribly inefficient to
> write the data every time something changes a value, however I don't
> see how I can do it on deletion. I've read that __del__ methods should
> be avoided. So am I just going to have to force the client of my
> object to call sync when they're done?

Lots of ways
1. Try the atexit module
2. Use a weakref callback
3. Embed a client callback in a try/finally.
4. Or, like you said, have the client call a sync() method -- this is
explicit and gives the client control over when data is written.

Raymond