Issue 1156: Suggested change to _exit function description in os module documentation (original) (raw)

Should "child" be replaced with "parent"?

No. I'm pretty much I wrote that. The use case I was thinking of is the error handling in the child process after the exec fails. if you were to use sys.exit() there, which raises SystemExit, you're likely to hit various exception handlers that were set up in the parent, and you even run the risk of some main loop continuing in the child. I've had many a program produce the phenomenon of "double tracebacks" due to this mistake.

OTOH, in the parent, if you want to exit after forking (e.g. to create a parent-less daemon process), a regular sys.exit() is usually just fine, as any exception handlers you might trigger were meant to be triggered.