start.py is a wrapper that can be used on Unix-like systems to turn Python programs into relatively well behaved Unix utilities.
Specifically, it:
- catches KeyboardInterrupt and makes the program die of SIGINT (without a stack traceback, by default)
- catches SIGPIPE and makes the program die with a SIGPIPE (without a stack traceback, by default)
- catches other exceptions and writes the traceback to a
.corefile
Core files are appended-to, with a timestamp of the problem, so that these "core dumps" can be delivered to maintainers.
If you are actively developing your code and want ^C and/or
traps to show you the stack trace in the usual fashion, set
environment variables PYTHON_SIGINT=true and/or PYTHON_DEBUG=true
(using export from sh/bash, or in front of the command being
run, as in PYTHON_DEBUG=true python myprog.py.
The code is compatible (and tested) with both Python 2.7 and 3.4.
Currently I think the traceback code may need a bit of work on Python 3 (because some items may not UTF-8 encode properly and the current code does not attempt to save them in a reversible format).