I feel obliged to point out that the method using
signal(SIGPIPE, SIG_DFL)
is indeed dangerous (as already suggested by David Bennet in the comments) and in my case led to platform-dependent funny business when combined with multiprocessing.Manager (because the standard library relies on BrokenPipeError being raised in several places). To make a long and painful story short, this is how I fixed it:
First, you need to catch the IOError (Python 2) or BrokenPipeError (Python 3). Depending on your program you can try to exit early at that point or just ignore the exception:
from errno import EPIPE
try:
broken_pipe_exception = BrokenPipeError
except NameError: # Python 2
broken_pipe_exception = IOError
try:
YOUR CODE GOES HERE
except broken_pipe_exception as exc:
if broken_pipe_exception == IOError:
if exc.errno != EPIPE:
raise
However, this isn't enough. Python 3 may still print a message like this:
Exception ignored in: <_io.TextIOWrapper name='<stdout>' mode='w' encoding='UTF-8'>
BrokenPipeError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe
Unfortunately getting rid of that message is not straightforward, but I finally found http://bugs.python.org/issue11380 where Robert Collins suggests this workaround that I turned into a decorator you can wrap your main function with (yes, that's some crazy indentation):
from functools import wraps
from sys import exit, stderr, stdout
from traceback import print_exc
def suppress_broken_pipe_msg(f):
@wraps(f)
def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
try:
return f(*args, **kwargs)
except SystemExit:
raise
except:
print_exc()
exit(1)
finally:
try:
stdout.flush()
finally:
try:
stdout.close()
finally:
try:
stderr.flush()
finally:
stderr.close()
return wrapper
@suppress_broken_pipe_msg
def main():
YOUR CODE GOES HERE