os._exit vs. sys.exit

[Bryan]

"Peter Hansen" <peter at engcorp.com> wrote in message 
news:u-SdnRAzQ9KHhnffRVn-gg at powergate.ca...
> Andrew Dalke wrote:
>> sys.exit() is identical to "raise SystemExit()".  It raises a Python
>> exception which may be caught at a higher level in the program stack.
>
> And which *is* caught at the highest levels of threading.Thread objects 
> (which Timer is based on).  Exceptions raised (and caught or not) in a 
> Thread do not have any effect on the main thread, and thus don't affect 
> the interpreter as a whole.
>
> -Peter

Thanks for the clarifications.  One more question, can I catch this 
exception in my main thread and then do another sys.exit() to kill the whole 
process?

Apparently sys.exit() allows the program to clean up resources and exit 
gracefully, while os._exit() is rather abrupt.

Bryan