Question

I’m using MacFSEvents, a Python library that monitors a directory for changes on Mac OS X, like so:

# from http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/M/MacFSEvents/
from fsevents import Observer
from fsevents import Stream
observer = Observer()

def callback(event):
    print event.name

stream = Stream(callback, '.', file_events=True)
observer.schedule(stream)
observer.start()

When I run this script in the Terminal, hitting Ctrl-C doesn’t exit the program — the only way I can find to kill it is with ‘kill’ in a separate window, or with Activity Monitor, etc.

Any ideas on how to make such a program killable by Ctrl-C?

Answer 1

An alternative is to look for KeyboardInterrupt and stop the observer manually (as an alternative to observer.run()):

def better_run(observer):
   try:
      observer.start()
      while True:      # instead of this infinite loop, you can do
         pass          # whatever processing you wanted
   except KeyboardInterrupt:
      observer.stop()