Is there a way to prevent a SystemExit exception raised from sys.exit() from being caught?

You can call os._exit() to directly exit, without throwing an exception:

import os
os._exit(1)

This bypasses all of the python shutdown logic, such as the atexit module, and will not run through the exception handling logic that you're trying to avoid in this situation. The argument is the exit code that will be returned by the process.

As Jerub said, os._exit(1) is your answer. But, considering it bypasses all cleanup procedures, including finally: blocks, closing files, etc, and should really be avoided at all costs, may I present a "safer-ish" way of using it?

If you problem is SystemExit being caught at outer levels (ie, unittest), then be the outer level yourself! Wrap your main code in a try/except block, catch SystemExit, and call os._exit there, and only there! This way you may call sys.exit normally anywhere in the code, let it bubble out to the top level, gracefully closing all files and running all cleanups, and then calling os._exit.

You can even choose which exits are the "emergency" ones. The code below is an example of such approach:

import sys, os

EMERGENCY = 255  # can be any number actually

try:
    # wrap your whole code here ...
    # ... some code
    if x: sys.exit()
    # ... some more code
    if y: sys.exit(EMERGENCY)  # use only for emergency exits
    # ...
except SystemExit as e:
    if e.code != EMERGENCY:
        raise  # normal exit, let unittest catch it
    else:
        os._exit(EMERGENCY)  # try to stop *that*, sucker!