Threading-> Stopping

[David Wahler]

Tuvas wrote:
> Is there a way to stop a thread with some command like t.stop()? Or any
> other neat way to get around it? Thanks!

Sadly, no. While Java and many other programming languages have an
interrupt() primitive, Python does not. You can approximate this by
using a global variable to tell the thread when to stop, for example:

shutdown = False

class MyThread(Thread):
    def run(self):
        while not shutdown:
            # do whatever

def kill_thread():
    shutdown = True

There's no general way to wake up a thread that's blocked--you have to
satisfy the condition that's causing it to block. If it's waiting for
input from a Queue, you have to push a dummy value down it to wake up
the thread and give it a chance to check the shutdown flag. If it's
blocking to do I/O, you'll have to use select() and provide a timeout
value to check the flag periodically.

-- David