Why did cProfile crash?

Python Help
1

What I Did

For github.com/Crozzers/screen_brightness_control/issues/25#issuecomment-3832118702, I attempted to do as stackoverflow.com/revisions/582337/10 advises:

    1. #!/usr/bin/env sh
python3.15 -m pip install screen_brightness_control

    2. Defaulting to user installation because normal site-packages is not writeable
Collecting screen_brightness_control
  Downloading screen_brightness_control-0.26.0-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (4.6 kB)
Downloading screen_brightness_control-0.26.0-py3-none-any.whl (35 kB)
Installing collected packages: screen_brightness_control
Successfully installed screen_brightness_control-0.26.0

[notice] A new release of pip is available: 25.3 -> 26.0
[notice] To update, run: python3.15 -m pip install --upgrade pip
RokeJulianLockhart@Beedell:~$ python3.15 -m pip install --upgrade pip
Defaulting to user installation because normal site-packages is not writeable
Requirement already satisfied: pip in ./.local/lib/python3.15/site-packages (25.3)
Collecting pip
  Downloading pip-26.0-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (4.7 kB)
Downloading pip-26.0-py3-none-any.whl (1.8 MB)
   ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 1.8/1.8 MB 3.9 MB/s  0:00:00
Installing collected packages: pip
  Attempting uninstall: pip
    Found existing installation: pip 25.3
    Uninstalling pip-25.3:
      Successfully uninstalled pip-25.3
Successfully installed pip-26.0

    1. #!/usr/bin/env sh
python3.15

    2. Python 3.15.0a5 (main, Jan 14 2026, 00:00:00) [GCC 15.2.1 20251211 (Red Hat 15.2.1-5)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import screen_brightness_control as sbc
>>> for monitor in sbc.list_monitors():
...     print(monitor, ':', sbc.get_brightness(display=monitor), '%')
...     
Q3279WG5B : [100] %
>>> sbc.set_brightness(1)
>>> import cProfile
>>> cProfile.run(sbc.set_brightness(100))
         2 function calls in 0.000 seconds

   Ordered by: standard name

   ncalls  tottime  percall  cumtime  percall filename:lineno(function)
        1    0.000    0.000    0.000    0.000 {built-in method builtins.exec}
        1    0.000    0.000    0.000    0.000 {method 'disable' of '_lsprof.Profiler' objects}


Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<python-input-4>", line 1, in <module>
    cProfile.run(sbc.set_brightness(100))
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.15/profiling/tracing/__init__.py", line 29, in run
    return _Utils(Profile).run(statement, filename, sort)
           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.15/profiling/tracing/_utils.py", line 13, in run
    prof.run(statement)
    ~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.15/profiling/tracing/__init__.py", line 112, in run
    return self.runctx(cmd, dict, dict)
           ~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.15/profiling/tracing/__init__.py", line 117, in runctx
    exec(cmd, globals, locals)
    ~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
TypeError: exec() arg 1 must be a string, bytes or code object

      abrt didn’t catch it as a misbehaviour.

My Environment

    1. #!/usr/bin/env sh
rpm -qi python3.15

    2. Name        : python3.15
Version     : 3.15.0~a5
Release     : 1.fc43
Architecture: x86_64
Install Date: Sun 25 Jan 2026 15:02:57 GMT
Size        : 29543
Signature   :
              RSA/SHA256, Fri 16 Jan 2026 17:39:52 GMT, Key ID 829b606631645531
Source RPM  : python3.15-3.15.0~a5-1.fc43.src.rpm
Build Date  : Fri 16 Jan 2026 10:30:49 GMT
Build Host  : buildhw-x86-09.rdu3.fedoraproject.org
Packager    : Fedora Project
Vendor      : Fedora Project
Bug URL     : https://bugz.fedoraproject.org/python3.15

    1. #!/usr/bin/env sh
python3.15 -m pip show screen_brightness_control

    2. Name: screen_brightness_control
Version: 0.26.0
Location: $HOME/.local/lib/python3.15/site-packages
Requires: 
Required-by:
2

You’re asking it to profile the result of set_brightness, which is probably None.

3

You likely want to run cProfile.run("sbc.set_brightness(100)") instead - notice the quotes wrapping the code you want to profile (similar to "foo()" in the Stack Overflow post you linked to)

1 Like