What happens when disk space runs out?

Question

Suppose I do:

with open("temp.txt", "w" as f):
    while True:
        f.write(1)

What shall happen when I come close to completely using up my disk space? It seems like a problem that might have been asked before, but unfortunately I didn't find anything. Thanks...

In case it matters, I'm on ubuntu.

Answer 1

When the disk will be full (or when you will exhaust your quota if the filesystem supports them), the write will raise an IOError. If that exception is not filtered in a try block, it will terminate the script.

But bad things could happen. Most tools currently expect to have enough disk and memory, and most system implement multi-tasking. That means that if you exhaust the system disk, various system components could start to malfunction, especially if you are running under an admin account. Long story made short: avoid that unless you are experimenting on a dedicated file system...