Programmatically exit the REPL

[Alexander Schmolck]

Without reading your post properly or having tried to do the same thing
myself: I think you might want to have a look at ipython; it gives a better
REPL and "embedding ipython" should give you plenty of hits as well.

Matthew Fitzgibbons <elessar at nienna.org> writes:

> I've got a pretty complex interactive command line program. Instead of writing
> my own REPL, I'm using the Python interpreter (an infinitely better solution).
> This program has two threads, a background thread and the REPL thread. When
> you call quit() or sys.exit() in the REPL thread, everything is perfectly
> happy. However, the background thread does some long-running jobs, and I want
> it to have the ability to exit the program when the job is complete. When I
> call quit() or sys.exit() from the background thread, the REPL merrily
> continues on its way.
>
> This is a very frustrating problem, so I'm hoping someone can shed some light
> on it. Am I missing something simple? Or is this just impossible? I don't see
> anything about breaking out of interact() in the code module docs.
>
>
> Here's a minimal example:
>
> #!/usr/bin/env python -i
> # You get the same behavior using code.interact()
>
> import sys
> import time
> import threading
>
> def end_the_program():
>     # works if you call it from the REPL thread,
>     # but not the background thread
>     print "called end_the_program()"
>     sys.exit()
>     # quit() # using quit() rather than sys.exit()
>              # results in identical behavior
>
> keep_going = True
> def runner():
>     while keep_going:
>         time.sleep(0.1)
>     end_the_program()
> threading.Thread(target=runner).start()
>
> # end example
>
>
> Here's the console session (edited for clarity):
>
> Desktop$ ./exit_repl.py
>>>> keep_going = False
> called end_the_program()
> # notice we didn't exit here
>>>> end_the_program()
> called end_the_program()
> # but we did exit here
> Desktop$
>
>
> -Matt

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