Question

Imagine a script is running in these 2 sets of “conditions”:

1. live action, set up in sudo crontab
2. debug, when I run it from console ./my-script.py

What I’d like to achieve is an automatic detection of “debug mode”, without me specifying an argument (e.g. --debug) for the script.

Is there a convention about how to do this? Is there a variable that can tell me who the script owner is? Whether script has a console at stdout? Run a ps | grep to determine that?

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

Since sys.stdin will be a TTY in debug mode, you can use the os.isatty() function:

import sys, os
if os.isatty(sys.stdin.fileno()):
    # Debug mode.
    pass
else:
    # Cron mode.
    pass