Exiting with core.quit() or sys.exit()

psychopm · March 5, 2018, 1:13pm

Can I safely close the application with sys.exit(‘msg’) or is it necessary to call core.quit()?
I am asking because I have seen a few examles where is sys.exit(‘msg’) used and I do not understand the difference.

Michael · March 5, 2018, 10:10pm

The code for core.quit() is here:

github.com

psychopy/psychopy/blob/master/psychopy/core.py#L70


"""Get the current time since psychopy.core was loaded.


Version Notes: Note that prior to PsychoPy 1.77.00 the behaviour of
getTime() was platform dependent (on OSX and linux it was equivalent to
:func:`psychopy.core.getAbsTime`
whereas on windows it returned time since loading of the module, as now)
"""
return monotonicClock.getTime()




def quit():
"""Close everything and exit nicely (ending the experiment)
"""
# pygame.quit()  # safe even if pygame was never initialised
logging.flush()


for thisThread in threading.enumerate():
    if hasattr(thisThread, 'stop') and hasattr(thisThread, 'running'):
        # this is one of our event threads - kill it and wait for success
        thisThread.stop()
        while thisThread.running == 0:

As you can see, .core.quit() calls sys.exit() itself, but before that, it does some PsychoPy-specific tidying. So you should use it. In effect core.quit() means “quit PsychoPy and then exit Python”.

Maybe in the examples you found, people used sys.exit() because they are experienced Python programmers but perhaps not so used to the PsychoPy API.

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Exiting with core.quit() or sys.exit()

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