Catch a thread's exception in the caller thread?

The problem is that thread_obj.start() returns immediately. The child thread that you spawned executes in its own context, with its own stack. Any exception that occurs there is in the context of the child thread, and it is in its own stack. One way I can think of right now to communicate this information to the parent thread is by using some sort of message passing, so you might look into that.

Try this on for size:

import sys
import threading
import queue


class ExcThread(threading.Thread):

    def __init__(self, bucket):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.bucket = bucket

    def run(self):
        try:
            raise Exception('An error occured here.')
        except Exception:
            self.bucket.put(sys.exc_info())


def main():
    bucket = queue.Queue()
    thread_obj = ExcThread(bucket)
    thread_obj.start()

    while True:
        try:
            exc = bucket.get(block=False)
        except queue.Empty:
            pass
        else:
            exc_type, exc_obj, exc_trace = exc
            # deal with the exception
            print exc_type, exc_obj
            print exc_trace

        thread_obj.join(0.1)
        if thread_obj.isAlive():
            continue
        else:
            break


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

The concurrent.futures module makes it simple to do work in separate threads (or processes) and handle any resulting exceptions:

import concurrent.futures
import shutil

def copytree_with_dots(src_path, dst_path):
    with concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=1) as executor:
        # Execute the copy on a separate thread,
        # creating a future object to track progress.
        future = executor.submit(shutil.copytree, src_path, dst_path)

        while future.running():
            # Print pretty dots here.
            pass

        # Return the value returned by shutil.copytree(), None.
        # Raise any exceptions raised during the copy process.
        return future.result()

concurrent.futures is included with Python 3.2, and is available as the backported futures module for earlier versions.

Although it is not possible to directly catch an exception thrown in a different thread, here's a code to quite transparently obtain something very close to this functionality. Your child thread must subclass the ExThread class instead of threading.Thread and the parent thread must call the child_thread.join_with_exception() method instead of child_thread.join() when waiting for the thread to finish its job.

Technical details of this implementation: when the child thread throws an exception, it is passed to the parent through a Queue and thrown again in the parent thread. Notice that there's no busy waiting in this approach .

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import threading
import Queue

class ExThread(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.__status_queue = Queue.Queue()

    def run_with_exception(self):
        """This method should be overriden."""
        raise NotImplementedError

    def run(self):
        """This method should NOT be overriden."""
        try:
            self.run_with_exception()
        except BaseException:
            self.__status_queue.put(sys.exc_info())
        self.__status_queue.put(None)

    def wait_for_exc_info(self):
        return self.__status_queue.get()

    def join_with_exception(self):
        ex_info = self.wait_for_exc_info()
        if ex_info is None:
            return
        else:
            raise ex_info[1]

class MyException(Exception):
    pass

class MyThread(ExThread):
    def __init__(self):
        ExThread.__init__(self)

    def run_with_exception(self):
        thread_name = threading.current_thread().name
        raise MyException("An error in thread '{}'.".format(thread_name))

def main():
    t = MyThread()
    t.start()
    try:
        t.join_with_exception()
    except MyException as ex:
        thread_name = threading.current_thread().name
        print "Caught a MyException in thread '{}': {}".format(thread_name, ex)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

If an exception occurs in a thread, the best way is to re-raise it in the caller thread during join. You can get information about the exception currently being handled using the sys.exc_info() function. This information can simply be stored as a property of the thread object until join is called, at which point it can be re-raised.

Note that a Queue.Queue (as suggested in other answers) is not necessary in this simple case where the thread throws at most 1 exception and completes right after throwing an exception. We avoid race conditions by simply waiting for the thread to complete.

For example, extend ExcThread (below), overriding excRun (instead of run).

Python 2.x:

import threading

class ExcThread(threading.Thread):
  def excRun(self):
    pass

  def run(self):
    self.exc = None
    try:
      # Possibly throws an exception
      self.excRun()
    except:
      import sys
      self.exc = sys.exc_info()
      # Save details of the exception thrown but don't rethrow,
      # just complete the function

  def join(self):
    threading.Thread.join(self)
    if self.exc:
      msg = "Thread '%s' threw an exception: %s" % (self.getName(), self.exc[1])
      new_exc = Exception(msg)
      raise new_exc.__class__, new_exc, self.exc[2]

Python 3.x:

The 3 argument form for raise is gone in Python 3, so change the last line to:

raise new_exc.with_traceback(self.exc[2])