[emj]

Ctrl-c cancels running processes, but not shells. When a process becomes a shell I can not say, but if make an infinite loop in the Python repl you can Ctrl-C that loop.

  $ python
  >>> while True:
  ...   pass
  ... 
  ^CTraceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  KeyboardInterrupt