How to exit from Python without traceback?

I would like to know how to I exit from Python without having an traceback dump on the output.

I still want want to be able to return an error code but I do not want to display the traceback log.

I want to be able to exit using exit(number) without trace but in case of an Exception (not an exit) I want the trace.

You are presumably encountering an exception and the program is exiting because of this (with a traceback). The first thing to do therefore is to catch that exception, before exiting cleanly (maybe with a message, example given).

Try something like this in your main routine:

import sys, traceback

def main():
    try:
        do main program stuff here
        ....
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        print "Shutdown requested...exiting"
    except Exception:
        traceback.print_exc(file=sys.stdout)
    sys.exit(0)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Perhaps you're trying to catch all exceptions and this is catching the SystemExit exception raised by sys.exit()?

import sys

try:
    sys.exit(1) # Or something that calls sys.exit()
except SystemExit as e:
    sys.exit(e)
except:
    # Cleanup and reraise. This will print a backtrace.
    # (Insert your cleanup code here.)
    raise

In general, using except: without naming an exception is a bad idea. You'll catch all kinds of stuff you don't want to catch -- like SystemExit -- and it can also mask your own programming errors. My example above is silly, unless you're doing something in terms of cleanup. You could replace it with:

import sys
sys.exit(1) # Or something that calls sys.exit().

If you need to exit without raising SystemExit:

import os
os._exit(1)

I do this, in code that runs under unittest and calls fork(). Unittest gets when the forked process raises SystemExit. This is definitely a corner case!

import sys
sys.exit(1)

The following code will not raise an exception and will exit without a traceback:

import os
os._exit(1)

See this question and related answers for more details. Surprised why all other answers are so overcomplicated.

something like import sys; sys.exit(0) ?

It's much better practise to avoid using sys.exit() and instead raise/handle exceptions to allow the program to finish cleanly. If you want to turn off traceback, simply use:

sys.trackbacklimit=0

You can set this at the top of your script to squash all traceback output, but I prefer to use it more sparingly, for example "known errors" where I want the output to be clean, e.g. in the file foo.py:

import sys
from subprocess import *

try:
  check_call([ 'uptime', '--help' ])
except CalledProcessError:
  sys.tracebacklimit=0
  print "Process failed"
  raise

print "This message should never follow an error."

If CalledProcessError is caught, the output will look like this:

[me@test01 dev]$ ./foo.py
usage: uptime [-V]
    -V    display version
Process failed
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['uptime', '--help']' returned non-zero exit status 1

If any other error occurs, we still get the full traceback output.

Use the built-in python function quit() and that's it. No need to import any library. I'm using python 3.4

I would do it this way:

import sys

def do_my_stuff():
    pass

if __name__ == "__main__":
    try:
        do_my_stuff()
    except SystemExit, e:
        print(e)

What about

import sys
....
....
....
sys.exit("I am getting the heck out of here!")

No traceback and somehow more explicit.

# Pygame Example  

import pygame, sys  
from pygame.locals import *

pygame.init()  
DISPLAYSURF = pygame.display.set_mode((400, 300))  
pygame.display.set_caption('IBM Emulator')

BLACK = (0, 0, 0)  
GREEN = (0, 255, 0)

fontObj = pygame.font.Font('freesansbold.ttf', 32)  
textSurfaceObj = fontObj.render('IBM PC Emulator', True, GREEN,BLACK)  
textRectObj = textSurfaceObj.get_rect()  
textRectObj = (10, 10)

try:  
    while True: # main loop  
        DISPLAYSURF.fill(BLACK)  
        DISPLAYSURF.blit(textSurfaceObj, textRectObj)  
        for event in pygame.event.get():  
            if event.type == QUIT:  
                pygame.quit()  
                sys.exit()  
        pygame.display.update()  
except SystemExit:  
    pass