Python sys.excepthook

Sometimes you just want python to do something else when you hit an exception, maybe that's fire a text, slack message, email, or system notification like I wanted.

I am working on a quick and dirty python script designed to take screenshots and land them on my website in a single hotkey. With it being designed to run with a hotkey, if it were to error I would not see it.

I could have gone down a logging route, but honestly this is meant to be quick, dirty, and work on my system for me. I just want to get it in my system notification.

sys.excepthook

Python exposes sys.excepthook for just this case. Here is what I ended up doing to fire a system notification as well as printing the message. Yaya a log would be mroe appropriate, but this is designed to just get done quick and do the job I want it to do.

def notify_exception(type, value, tb):
    traceback_details = "\n".join(traceback.extract_tb(tb).format())

    msg = f"caller: {' '.join(sys.argv)}\n{type}: {value}\n{traceback_details}"
    print(msg)
    Popen(
        f'notify-send "screenshot.py hit an exception" "{msg}" -a screenshot.py',
        shell=True,
    )


sys.excepthook = notify_exception
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Discuss

This was my first time ever using sys.excepthook Have you used it for anything before?