Kill Python Interpeter in Linux from the Terminal

How to stop/terminate a python script from running?

To stop your program, just press Control + C.

Exiting from python Command Line

In my python interpreter exit is actually a string and not a function -- 'Use Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit.'. You can check on your interpreter by entering type(exit)

In active python what is happening is that exit is a function. If you do not call the function it will print out the string representation of the object. This is the default behaviour for any object returned. It's just that the designers thought people might try to type exit to exit the interpreter, so they made the string representation of the exit function a helpful message. You can check this behaviour by typing str(exit) or even print exit.

How to Exit Linux terminal using Python script?

SIGHUP (hang up) will tell the terminal to exit. The terminal should be your script's parent process, so

import os
import signal
os.kill(os.getppid(), signal.SIGHUP)

How to terminate process from Python using pid?

Using the awesome psutil library it's pretty simple:

p = psutil.Process(pid)
p.terminate()  #or p.kill()

If you don't want to install a new library, you can use the os module:

import os
import signal

os.kill(pid, signal.SIGTERM) #or signal.SIGKILL 

See also the os.kill documentation.

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If you are interested in starting the command python StripCore.py if it is not running, and killing it otherwise, you can use psutil to do this reliably.

Something like:

import psutil
from subprocess import Popen

for process in psutil.process_iter():
    if process.cmdline() == ['python', 'StripCore.py']:
        print('Process found. Terminating it.')
        process.terminate()
        break
else:
    print('Process not found: starting it.')
    Popen(['python', 'StripCore.py'])

Sample run:

$python test_strip.py   #test_strip.py contains the code above
Process not found: starting it.
$python test_strip.py 
Process found. Terminating it.
$python test_strip.py 
Process not found: starting it.
$killall python
$python test_strip.py 
Process not found: starting it.
$python test_strip.py 
Process found. Terminating it.
$python test_strip.py 
Process not found: starting it.

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Note: In previous psutil versions cmdline was an attribute instead of a method.

How to stop execution of python script in visual studio code?

There should be a trashcan at the top of the integrated terminal window. Clicking the trashcan will kill the window and the processes.

You can also try ctrl-Z or ctrl-D.

How to clear the interpreter console?

As you mentioned, you can do a system call:

For Windows:

>>> import os
>>> clear = lambda: os.system('cls')
>>> clear()

For Linux it would be:

>>> import os
>>> clear = lambda: os.system('clear')
>>> clear()

Stopping python using ctrl+c

On Windows, the only sure way is to use CtrlBreak. Stops every python script instantly!

(Note that on some keyboards, "Break" is labeled as "Pause".)

How can I get a Python program to kill itself using a command run through the module sys?

You can use sys.exit() to exit the program normally.

Exit the interpreter by raising SystemExit(status).
If the status is omitted or None, it defaults to zero (i.e., success).
If the status is an integer, it will be used as the system exit status.
If it is another kind of object, it will be printed and the system
exit status will be one (i.e., failure).

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The system command to kill the interpreter itself depends on the shell used; if your shell is bash or zsh, you can use:

a@host:~$ python
Python 2.7.8 (default, Oct 20 2014, 15:05:19) 
[GCC 4.9.1] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> os.system('kill $PPID')
Terminated
a@host:~$

Though your actual results may vary. To be safer, you need to provide the process ID yourself:

>>> os.system('kill %d' % os.getpid())

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If you want to just a get signal sent to your process, you can also use os.kill() with the process id of your process; the process id of currently running process is available from os.getpid():

a@host:~$  python
Python 2.7.8 (default, Oct 20 2014, 15:05:19) 
[GCC 4.9.1] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> os.kill(os.getpid(), 9)
[1]    27248 killed     python
a@host:~$ 

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