Catch a thread's exception in the caller thread in Python

Question

I'm very new to Python and multithreaded programming in general. Basically, I have a script that will copy files to another location. I would like this to be placed in another thread so I can output .... to indicate that the script is still running.

The problem that I am having is that if the files cannot be copied it will throw an exception. This is ok if running in the main thread; however, having the following code does not work:

try:
    threadClass = TheThread(param1, param2, etc.)
    threadClass.start()   ##### **Exception takes place here**
except:
    print "Caught an exception"

In the thread class itself, I tried to re-throw the exception, but it does not work. I have seen people on here ask similar questions, but they all seem to be doing something more specific than what I am trying to do (and I don't quite understand the solutions offered). I have seen people mention the usage of sys.exc_info(), however I do not know where or how to use it.

All help is greatly appreciated!

EDIT: The code for the thread class is below:

class TheThread(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self, sourceFolder, destFolder):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.sourceFolder = sourceFolder
        self.destFolder = destFolder

    def run(self):
        try:
           shul.copytree(self.sourceFolder, self.destFolder)
        except:
           raise

Answer 1

The problem is that thread_obj.start() returns immediately. The child thread that you spawned executes in its own context, with its own stack. Any exception that occurs there is in the context of the child thread, and it is in its own stack. One way I can think of right now to communicate this information to the parent thread is by using some sort of message passing, so you might look into that.

Try this on for size:

import sys
import threading
import Queue


class ExcThread(threading.Thread):

    def __init__(self, bucket):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.bucket = bucket

    def run(self):
        try:
            raise Exception('An error occured here.')
        except Exception:
            self.bucket.put(sys.exc_info())


def main():
    bucket = Queue.Queue()
    thread_obj = ExcThread(bucket)
    thread_obj.start()

    while True:
        try:
            exc = bucket.get(block=False)
        except Queue.Empty:
            pass
        else:
            exc_type, exc_obj, exc_trace = exc
            # deal with the exception
            print exc_type, exc_obj
            print exc_trace

        thread_obj.join(0.1)
        if thread_obj.isAlive():
            continue
        else:
            break


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()