If you're using python 2.5+ you can use the with keyword (though 2.5 needs `from future import with_statement)
with open('filename.txt', 'r') as f:
#do stuff here
pass
#here f has been closed and disposed properly - even with raised exceptions
I don't know what kind of catastrophic failure needs to bork the with statement, but I assume it's a really bad one. On WinXP, my quick unscientific test:
import time
with open('test.txt', 'w') as f:
f.write('testing\n')
while True:
time.sleep(1)
and then killing the process with Windows Task Manager still wrote the data to file.
