Question

I knew that sys.exit() raises an Exit exception, so when I run this I knew it wouldn’t exit:

In [25]: try:
   ....:     sys.exit()
   ....: except:
   ....:     print "oops"
   ....:     
oops

But I thought that os._exit() was meant to exit using a C call, but it’s also causing an exception:

In [28]: try:
   ....:     os._exit()
   ....: except:
   ....:     print "oops"
   ....:     
oops

Is there a way of doing this without killing the PID?

Answer 1

Don’t use except without an Exception class, so sys.exit will just work fine without triggering the exception handling:

>>> import sys
>>> try:
...     sys.exit()
... except Exception:
...     print 'oops'
... 
$ 

There are other exceptions which are triggered with a plain except clause (and in general shouldn’t), especially KeyboardInterrupt.