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pythonfunctionexit

Doing something before program exit

How can you have a function or something that will be executed before your program quits? I have a script that will be constantly running in the background, and I need it to save some data to a file before it exits. Is there a standard way of doing this?

Solution

  • Check out the atexit module:

    http://docs.python.org/library/atexit.html

    For example, if I wanted to print a message when my application was terminating:

    import atexit

def exit_handler():
    print 'My application is ending!'

atexit.register(exit_handler)

    Just be aware that this works great for normal termination of the script, but it won't get called in all cases (e.g. fatal internal errors).