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Of all the things I've lost...

I installed a sys.excepthook in my project at work that uses the logging module to record any uncaught exceptions. It didn't work.

I did what any lazy programmer would do: ask someone more experienced. "Do you have to set sys.excepthook in each thread?" I asked, more-or-less. "I don't think so," he replied.

Hmm. Maybe the developer I'd taken over from was setting excepthook later on in the initialization or somewhere else. ... Nope.

Finally I wrote this: 

import sys, threading

def log_exception(*args):
    print 'got exception %s' % (args,)
sys.excepthook = log_exception

def foo():
    a = 1 / 0
threading.Thread(target=foo).start()

Playing with this a bit demonstrates that sys.excepthook doesn't work in subthreads, at all. The documentation doesn't mention anything of the sort. Smells like a bug to me. (I did file one.)

I belatedly googled "sys.excepthook threads." (I must have been a bit slow this morning to not do this first.) I was more than a little surprised to see my name in the first result that came back. (And a little disappointed that eight months later there's still no replies. :)

I've been a father for a couple years now, so I've gotten used to my memory being a little fuzzy now and then. But usually it's just, well, a bit fuzzy. I can tell that there are details I don't remember immediately, and they usually swim back if I think about it hard enough. But I don't remember posting that at all, nor can I recall what I was working on to prompt it. Funny. But also a little scary.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Must be a realignment of the time lines or something; I had a similar event today with someone I hadn't seen in a while commenting about a post I'd made supposedly a month or so ago that I didn't remember at all.
12:00 AM
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