Exception on keypress

[Michael Goerz]

Hi,

I'm writing a command line program that watches a file, and recompiles 
it when it changes. However, there should also be a possibility of doing 
a complete clean restart (cleaning up temp files, compiling some 
dependencies, etc.).

Since the program is in an infinite loop, there are limited means of 
interacting with it. Right now, I'm using the Keyboard Interrupt: if the 
user presses CTRL+C once, a clean restart is done, if he presses it 
twice within a second, the program terminates. The stripped down code 
looks like this:

     while True:
         try:
             time.sleep(1)
             if watched_file_has_changed():
                 compile_the_changed_file()
         except KeyboardInterrupt: # user hits CTRL+C
             try:
                 print("Hit Ctrl+C again to quit")
                 time.sleep(1)
                 clean_restart()
             except KeyboardInterrupt:
                 do_some_cleanup()
                 sys.exit(0)

Is there another way of doing this? Ideally, there would be an exception 
every time any key at all is pressed while the code in the try block is 
being executed. That way, the user could just hit the 'R' key  to do a 
clean restart, and the 'E' key to exit the program. Is there any way to 
implement something like that?

Right now, the CTRL+C solution works, but isn't very extensible (It 
wouldn't be easy to add another command, for example). Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Michael