How to exit pdb and allow program to continue?

continue should "Continue execution, only stop when a breakpoint is encountered", so you've got a breakpoint set somewhere. To remove the breakpoint (if you inserted it manually):

(Pdb) breakNum Type         Disp Enb   Where1   breakpoint   keep yes   at /path/to/test.py:5(Pdb) clear 1Deleted breakpoint 1(Pdb) continue

Or, if you're using pdb.set_trace(), you can try this (although if you're using pdb in more fancy ways, this may break things...)

(Pdb) pdb.set_trace = lambda: None  # This replaces the set_trace() function!(Pdb) continue# No more breaks!

A simple Ctrl-D will break out of pdb. If you want to continue rather than breaking, just press c rather than the whole continue command

The answer from @voithos is correct, so I'll just add one alternative in the case where you are using set_trace. Yes, the pdb.set_trace = lambda: None hack works OK, but not if you have other breakpoints set and want to reenable it later on. To me this points to the fact that unfortunately pdb is missing a bunch of functionality (even basic stuff like display lists), and this is another case.

The good news is that pdb++ is a great drop-in replacement for pdb, and one of the things it solves is exactly the problem of disabling set_trace. So you can simply do:

pip install pdbpp

and then at the (Pdb++) prompt, type:

pdb.disable()

If you want to reenable later, unsurprisingly this works:

pdb.enable()

Easy! And you will get lots of other useful goodies on top of that.