os.system('exit') in python

My friend is in a macOS environment and he wanted to call os.system('exit') at the end of his python script to make the terminal close. It doesn't. This doesn't surprise me but I would like to know what exactly is going on between the python script and the terminal whe开发者_如何转开发n this call is made.

In my mental simulation the terminal should have to tell you that there are still running jobs, but that doesn't happen either.

As a side question : will some less common terminals close when a process calls this?

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read the help:

Execute the command (a string) in a subshell.

A subshell is launched, and exit is run in that subshell.

To exit the enclosing terminal, you have to kill the parent. One way to do it is:

os.system("kill -9 %d"%(os.getppid())

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The system function starts another shell to execute a command. So in this case your Python scripts starts a shell and runs "exit" command in there, which makes that process exit. However, the Python script itself, including a terminal where it is running, continues to run. If the intent is to kill the terminal, you have to get the parent process ID and send a signal requesting it to stop. That will kill both Python script and a terminal.

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Remember that system first spawns/forks a sub-shell to execute its commands. In effect, you are asking only the sub-shell to exit.