Add import sys.exit to optimum_cli.py - #2325

@rasapala where do you get this error ? windows ?

Yes it was discovered on windows.

@rasapala and why would anyone run optimum cli with no params ? 😅
whats being fixed here exactly, please elaborate

I have run into the problem while checking optimum-cli installation. First command to run to check if its available in env PATH is to run optimum-cli command. Then the problem occurred. I have worked around it and checked optimum-cli -h and everyone can do that but I wanted to let you know that this scenario may happen and this is a fix for it.

I just pip installed optimum in my windows env and ran optimum-cli.exe and it worked fine

Successfully installed MarkupSafe-3.0.2 filelock-3.19.1 fsspec-2025.9.0 huggingface_hub-0.34.4 jinja2-3.1.6 mpmath-1.3.0 networkx-3.5 optimum-1.27.0 pyyaml-6.0.2 regex-2025.9.1 safetensors-0.6.2 setuptools-80.9.0 sympy-1.14.0 tokenizers-0.22.0 torch-2.8.0 transformers-4.56.1
PS C:\Users\ilyas> optimum-cli.exe
usage: optimum-cli

positional arguments:
  {export,env}
    export      Export PyTorch and TensorFlow models to several format.
    env         Get information about the environment used.

options:
  -h, --help    show this help message and exit
PS C:\Users\ilyas> 

is this related to a specific python version ?

Yes, it fails on newer python version like 3.12.10.

sorry I wasn't able to reproduce..
I did the following on my windows machine:

uv venv --python 3.12.10
.venv\Scripts\activate
uv pip install optimum
optimum-cli

and didn't get any errors 🤔

I think the problem occurs when you use standard Python installation procedures with python installer.
https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.12.10/python-3.12.10-amd64.exe

hmm i wasn't able to reproduce, but was able to find references to this issue in the python org / cpython repo python/cpython#73089 what I suggest to do is to import sys and use sys.exit() in the cli tool instead of exit(), following the answer in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19747371/python-exit-commands-why-so-many-and-when-should-each-be-used

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