Is there a way to prevent a SystemExit exception raised from sys.exit() from being caught?

python exception exit systemexit
John picture John · Oct 6, 2008 · Viewed 57.1k times · Source

The docs say that calling sys.exit() raises a SystemExit exception which can be caught in outer levels. I have a situation in which I want to definitively and unquestionably exit from inside a test case, however the unittest module catches SystemExit and prevents the exit. This is normally great, but the specific situation I am trying to handle is one where our test framework has detected that it is configured to point to a non-test database. In this case I want to exit and prevent any further tests from being run. Of course since unittest traps the SystemExit and continues happily on it's way, it is thwarting me.

The only option I have thought of so far is using ctypes or something similar to call exit(3) directly but this seems like a pretty fugly hack for something that should be really simple.

Answer

Jerub picture Jerub · Oct 6, 2008

You can call os._exit() to directly exit, without throwing an exception:

import os
os._exit(1)

This bypasses all of the python shutdown logic, such as the atexit module, and will not run through the exception handling logic that you're trying to avoid in this situation. The argument is the exit code that will be returned by the process.

Related questions

How can I safely create a nested directory?

What is the most elegant way to check if the directory a file is going to be written to exists, and if not, create the directory using Python? Here is what I tried: import os file_path = "/my/directory/filename.…

Read More
Manually raising (throwing) an exception in Python

How can I raise an exception in Python so that it can later be caught via an except block?

Read More
How do I check if a variable exists?

I want to check if a variable exists. Now I'm doing something like this: try: myVar except NameError: # Do something. Are there other ways without exceptions?

Read More