How do I exit program in try/except?

Question

I have this try/except code:

document = raw_input ('Your document name is ')  try:     with open(document, 'r') as a:         for element in a:            print element  except:     print document, 'does not exist' 

How do I exit the program after I print "[filename] does not exist"? break and pass obviously don't work, and I don't want to have any crashing errors, so sys.exit is not an option.

Please ignore the try part - it's just a dummy.

Answer 1

Use the sys.exit:

import sys  try:     # do something except Exception, e:     print >> sys.stderr, "does not exist"     print >> sys.stderr, "Exception: %s" % str(e)     sys.exit(1) 

A good practice is to print the Exception that occured so you can debug afterwards.

You can also print the stacktrace with the traceback module.

Note that the int you return in sys.exit will be the return code of your program. To see what exit code your program returned (which will give you information about what happens and can be automated), you can do:

echo $? 

Answer 2

Using

sys.exit(1) 

is not a crashing error, it's a perfectly normal way to exit a program. The exit code of 1 is a convention that means something went wrong (you would return 0 in the case of a successful run).