destructor not called

George Sakkis george.sakkis at gmail.com
Sun Sep 28 14:08:43 EDT 2008

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On Sep 28, 12:00 pm, Marcin201 <marcin... at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have a class which uses a temporary directory for storing data.  I
> would like that directory to be removed when the class is no longer
> used.  I have tried removing the temporary directory from the class
> destructor, however, it was never called.  After I while I traced the
> problem to the class having a reference to it's own function.  Here is
> a simplified model.
>
> test.py
> class Foo:
>     def __init__(self):
>         print "Hello"
>         self.f = self.fxn
>
>     def __del__(self):
>         print "Bye"
>
>     def fxn(self):
>         print "function"
>
> a = Foo()
>
> running python test.py I get
> Hello
>
> Is this an expected behavior or a bug in python?  If this is expected
> any suggestions for working around this.  I would like to avoid having
> to call the destructor explicitly.

Others have already replied to your main question; in short you
shouldn't rely on __del__ being called. Regardless, is there a (good)
reason for having an instance reference to the method ? Without
further information, that seems like a code smell.

George

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