[Python-Dev] Segmentaion fault with wrongly set PYTHONPATH on Windows (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Oct 23 02:04:56 CEST 2012

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

For most users, it doesn't matter whether an environment variable is set incorrectly without their knowledge, or if the kernel is buggy, or if the disk is corrupt. And from Python's point of view, the world as a whole no longer makes.

So it shuts down abnormally. That's what an abort means, in programming as in rocket launches.

Seems to me the only reason to use SIGABRT rather than exit() with an error code is to provoke a core dump, and that's only useful if we suspect a bug in Python itself. That's not the case here -- the cause is clearly something external.

-- Greg

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