[Python-Dev] Killing threads (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.one@home.com
Wed, 23 May 2001 15:45:06 -0400

[Aahz]

Okay, so we all know it isn't possible to kill threads cleanly and safely in any kind of cross-platform way. At the same time, a program that has a thread running haywire should be able to kill itself completely, so that a monitoring process can restart it. How hard would it be to do only that in a cross-platform way?

Since Python is written in C, and C says nothing about this, you need a platform expert for each platform covered by "cross" .

I'm guessing that for Unix, we'd just send a hard signal (9 or 15). No clue what would need to happen for Windows and Mac.

(This got brought up because I experimented with os.exit() as a possible solution, but that GPFs on Win98SE.)

Please open a bug report on that, then, with a tiny test case if possible. This worked fine on Win98SE for me just now:

import thread, os, time

def task(): while 1: print "x", time.sleep(.1)

for i in range(10): thread.start_new_thread(task, ())

time.sleep(5) os._exit(1)

Windows kills all threads spawned by a process when "the main thread" exits. You don't need to do os._exit(), and sys.exit() is normally a much better idea (else, e.g., stdio buffers may not get flushed to disk).