How to safely run unreliable piece of code?

Question

Suppose you are working with some bodgy piece of code which you can\'t trust, is there a way to run it safely without losing control of your script?

An example mig

Answer 1

To be safe against exceptions, use try/except (but I guess you know that).

To be safe against hanging code (endless loop) the only way I know is running the code in another process. This child process you can kill from the father process in case it does not terminate soon enough.

To be safe against nasty code (doing things it shall not do), have a look at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/RestrictedPython .