code.interact() is provided as a method to embed an interactive shell in arbitrary python code. It was used in pdb for interact command.

However, when the user needs to exit, they probably will use a very familiar command exit() (or quit()), then they'll realize that the whole process is terminated. In most of the cases, that's not the expected bahavior. The user probably just wants to exit the interpreter and go back to the original code.

Ctrl+D(Ctrl+Z then enter) works as expected because there's logic to handle that specifically.

Simply catching SystemExit won't work because builtins.exit() and builtins.quit() (if provided) will also close sys.stdin (weird behavior to me) and it's not trivial to reopen stdin.

To provide a more reasonable and unified behavior, we can replace the exit and quit in builtins in the interactive shell, and switch back after. This will also make pdb happier.

Linked PRs

• gh-102895 Add an option local_exit in code.interact to block exit() from terminating the whole process #102896