atexit — Exit handlers

Python documentation

———
The atexit module defines functions to register and unregister exit handlers: functions that are automatically executed “at exit”, that is, upon normal program termination (for instance, if

sys.exit()

is called or the main module’s execution completes) or, more generally, upon

interpreter shutdown

.

At exit, all registered exit handlers are called in the reverse order in which they were registered. If you register A, B, and C, at interpreter shutdown time they will be run in the order C, B, A. The assumption is that lower level modules will normally be imported before higher level modules and thus must be cleaned up later.

If an exception is raised during execution of an exit handler, a traceback is printed (unless

SystemExit

is raised) and the exception information is saved. After all exit handlers have had a chance to run, the last exception to be raised is re-raised.

In programs that use multiple interpreters, each interpreter has its own stack of exit handlers, which are executed when the interpreter shuts down (for example, with

concurrent.interpreters.Interpreter.close()

or the C API

Py_EndInterpreter()

). Registration functions in this module only affect the interpreter they are called from.

Note: Exit handlers are not called when the program is killed by a signal not handled by Python, when a Python fatal internal error is detected, or when

os._exit()

is called.

Note: The effect of registering or unregistering functions from within a cleanup function is undefined.

Warning

When writing exit handlers, especially in C API extensions, keep in mind that other exit handlers may still run arbitrary Python code after you clean up. Such code should succeed or fail with an exception, rather than crash.

Changed in version 3.12: Attempts to start a new thread or

os.fork()

a new process in an exit handler now leads to

RuntimeError

. Previously, this could cause race conditions between the main Python runtime thread freeing thread states while internal

threading

routines or the new process try to use that state, which could lead to crashes rather than clean shutdown.

Changed in version 3.7: When used with subinterpreters, registered functions are local to the interpreter they were registered in.

atexit.register(func, *args, **kwargs)

Register func as an exit handler. Any optional arguments that are to be passed to func must be passed as arguments to register(). It is possible to register the same function and arguments more than once.

This function returns func, which makes it possible to use it as a decorator.

atexit.unregister(func)

Remove func from the list of exit handlers. unregister() silently does nothing if func was not previously registered. If func has been registered more than once, every occurrence of that function in the atexit call stack will be removed. Equality comparisons (==) are used internally during unregistration, so function references do not need to have matching identities.

See also

Module

readline

Useful example of atexit to read and write

readline

history files.

atexit Example

The following simple example demonstrates how a module can initialize a counter from a file when it is imported and save the counter’s updated value automatically when the program terminates without relying on the application making an explicit call into this module at termination.

try:withopen('counterfile')asinfile:_count=int(infile.read())exceptFileNotFoundError:_count=0defincrcounter(n):global_count_count=_count+ndefsavecounter():withopen('counterfile','w')asoutfile:outfile.write('%d'%_count)importatexitatexit.register(savecounter)Positional and keyword arguments may also be passed to

register()

to be passed along to the registered function when it is called:

defgoodbye(name,adjective):print('Goodbye %s, it was %s to meet you.'%(name,adjective))importatexitatexit.register(goodbye,'Donny','nice')# or:atexit.register(goodbye,adjective='nice',name='Donny')Usage as a

decorator

:

[email protected]():print('You are now leaving the Python sector.')This only works with functions that can be called without arguments.