Question

Well, I have made a module that allows you to copy a file to a directory easier. Now, I also have some “try’s” and “except’s” in there to make sure it doesn’t fail in the big messy way and doesn’t close the terminal, but I also want it to display different error messages when a wrong string or variable is put in, and end the module, but not the…if I may say, Terminal running it, so I did this:

def copy():
    import shutil
    import os
    try:
        cpy = input("CMD>>> Name of file(with extension): ")
        open(cpy, "r")
    except:
        print("ERROR>>> 02x00 No such file")
    try:
        dri = input("CMD>>> Name of Directory: ")
        os.chdir(dri)
        os.chdir("..")
    except:
        print("ERROR>>> 03x00 No such directory")
    try:
        shutil.copy(cpy, dri)
    except:
        print("ERROR>>> 04x00 Command Failure")

Problem is that it doesn’t end the module if there is no file or directory, only at the finish.

Answer 1

You may be thinking that when an exception is raised, Python just stops what it’s doing, but that’s not quite true. The except: block actually catches the exception raised, and is supposed to handle it. After an except: block finishes, Python will continue on executing the rest of the code in the file.

In your case, I’d put a return after each print(...). That way, after Python prints out an error message, it will also return from the copy() function rather than continuing to ask for more input.