Stop python from closing on error

try:
    #do some stuff
    1/0 #stuff that generated the exception
except Exception as ex:
    print ex
    raw_input()

On UNIX systems (Windows has already been covered above...) you can change the interpreter argument to include the -i flag:

#!/usr/bin/python -i

From the man page:

-i

When a script is passed as first argument or the -c option is used, enter interactive mode after executing the script or the command. It does not read the $PYTHONSTARTUP file. This can be useful to inspect global variables or a stack trace when a script raises an exception.

If you doing this on a Windows OS, you can prefix the target of your shortcut with:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /K <command>

This will prevent the window from closing when the command exits.

You can register a top-level exception handler that keeps the application alive when an unhandled exception occurs:

def show_exception_and_exit(exc_type, exc_value, tb):
    import traceback
    traceback.print_exception(exc_type, exc_value, tb)
    raw_input("Press key to exit.")
    sys.exit(-1)

 import sys
 sys.excepthook = show_exception_and_exit

This is especially useful if you have exceptions occuring inside event handlers that are called from C code, which often do not propagate the errors.