del behavior 2

[Eric Snow]

On Jan 7, 12:42 pm, Eric Snow <es... at verio.net> wrote:
> I was reading in the documentation about __del__ and have a couple of
> questions.  Here is what I was looking at:
>
> http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#object.__del__
>
> My second question is about the following:
>
> "It is not guaranteed that __del__() methods are called for objects
> that still exist when the interpreter exits."
>
> I understand that and have seen it too.  That's fine.  But how do any
> of you deal with things that are left open because you did not get a
> chance to close them?  How do you clean up after the fact?  Do you
> simply keep track externally the things that need to be cleaned up if
> __del__ doesn't get a chance?  Any ideas?  Thanks
>
> -eric

So I see a couple of options here.  Thanks for all the suggestions
everyone.  Here is what I have:

- use try/finally to clean things up
- set a handler using signal.signal to clean everything up

There is also having try/except for more specific behvaior, like for
KeyboardInterrupt, but I am not sure I need that much specificity.
Again, thanks for all the great help.  Really cleared things up for
me.

-eric