What does sys.exit(1) means?

[Peter Hansen]

Ken wrote:
> 
> What does sys.exit(1) means?

You can find this if you Read the Fine Manual at 
http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-sys.html .  There is similar
documentation for all functions in all standard modules, in case you have
similar questions in the future...

sys.exit([arg]) 
     Exit from Python. This is implemented by raising the SystemExit exception, 
     so cleanup actions specified by finally clauses of try statements are honored, and 
     it is possible to intercept the exit attempt at an outer level. The optional 
     argument arg can be an integer giving the exit status (defaulting to zero), or 
     another type of object.  If it is an integer, zero is considered ``successful 
     termination'' and any nonzero value is considered ``abnormal termination'' by shells 
     and the like. Most systems require it to be in the range 0-127, and produce 
     undefined results otherwise. Some systems have a convention for assigning specific 
     meanings to specific exit codes, but these are generally underdeveloped; Unix programs 
     generally use 2 for command line syntax errors and 1 for all other kind of errors. 
     If another type of object is passed,  None is equivalent to passing zero, and any 
     other object is printed to sys.stderr and results in an exit code of 1. In 
     particular, sys.exit("some error message") is a quick way to exit a program when 
     an error occurs. 

-Peter