How to exit from Python without traceback

Question

I would like to know how to I exit from Python without having an traceback dump on the output.

I still want want to be able to return an error code but I do not want to display the traceback log.

I want to be able to exit using exit(number) without trace but in case of an Exception (not an exit) I want the trace.

Answer 1

Perhaps you're trying to catch all exceptions and this is catching the SystemExit exception raised by sys.exit()?

import sys try: sys.exit(1) # Or something that calls sys.exit() except SystemExit as e: sys.exit(e) except: # Cleanup and reraise. This will print a backtrace. # (Insert your cleanup code here.) raise

In general, using except: without naming an exception is a bad idea. You'll catch all kinds of stuff you don't want to catch -- like SystemExit -- and it can also mask your own programming errors. My example above is silly, unless you're doing something in terms of cleanup. You could replace it with:

import sys sys.exit(1) # Or something that calls sys.exit().

If you need to exit without raising SystemExit:

import os os._exit(1)

I do this, in code that runs under unittest and calls fork(). Unittest gets when the forked process raises SystemExit. This is definitely a corner case!