Following this example in the ØMQ docs, I'm trying to create a simple receiver. The example uses infinite loop. Everything works just fine. However, on MS Windows, when I hit CTRL+C to raise KeyboardInterrupt, the loop does not break. It seems that recv()
method somehow ignores the exception. However, I'd love to exit the process by hiting CTRL+C instead of killing it. Is that possible?

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4 Answers
In response to the @Cyclone's request, I suggest the following as a possible solution:
import signal
signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, signal.SIG_DFL);
# any pyzmq-related code, such as `reply = socket.recv()`
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Excelent. This worked for me (Windows 10). Haven't tried the accepted answer, but it seems you're also using this for your fix. – Robert Verdes Jan 15 '20 at 21:50
A zmq.Poller
object seems to help:
def poll_socket(socket, timetick = 100):
poller = zmq.Poller()
poller.register(socket, zmq.POLLIN)
# wait up to 100msec
try:
while True:
obj = dict(poller.poll(timetick))
if socket in obj and obj[socket] == zmq.POLLIN:
yield socket.recv()
except KeyboardInterrupt:
pass
# Escape while loop if there's a keyboard interrupt.
Then you can do things like:
for message in poll_socket(socket):
handle_message(message)
and the for-loop will automatically terminate on Ctrl-C. It looks like the translation from Ctrl-C to a Python KeyboardInterrupt only happens when the interpreter is active and Python has not yielded control to low-level C code; the pyzmq recv()
call apparently blocks while in low-level C code, so Python never gets a chance to issue the KeyboardInterrupt. But if you use zmq.Poller
then it will stop at a timeout and give the interpreter a chance to issue the KeyboardInterrupt after the timeout is complete.

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2As of today, I'm still sometimes forced to kill my applications instead of hitting CTRL+C -- very uncomfortable... I'm also working with `zmq.Poller` (thanks for the "for..in" pattern, btw.!), but there are situations where the Poller does not help: 1) using built-in devices (`zmq.device()`), 2) using REQ sockets in case that REP worker breaks. I discovered the following: http://zguide.zeromq.org/py:interrupt, but have found no use of it. – Tregoreg Jan 23 '14 at 17:30
Don't know if this going to work in Windows, but in Linux I did something like this:
if signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, signal.SIG_DFL):
sys.exit()

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2This does not work for me exactly, ``sys.exit()`` is always called -- in the docs, I've found that ``signal.signal(...)`` only sets the signal handler. However, putting ``signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, signal.SIG_DFL);`` before the infinite loop solved my problem and it is now possible to terminate the receiver using CTRL+C! So thanks a lot for hint! – Tregoreg Jun 18 '13 at 18:16
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1@Tregoreg, you should post your comment as an answer. I'll upvote it... worked for me, and a lot cleaner than changing how my code handles request handling. – Cyclone Oct 15 '14 at 17:32
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Try ctrl+break (as in the key above Page Up, I had to look it up, I don't think I've ever touched that key before) suggested near the bottom of this thread. I haven't done anything too fancy, but this seems to work well enough in the cases I've tried.

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