[Python-Dev] Issue with _thread.interrupt_main (29926) (original) (raw)

Martin Panter vadmium+py at gmail.com
Tue Mar 28 02:00:11 EDT 2017

On 28 March 2017 at 03:11, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 10:33:44PM -0400, Terry Reedy wrote:

https://bugs.python.org/issue29926 was opened as an IDLE issue, which means that most watching the new issues list would ignore it. But I think it is an issue with thread.interruptmain (which IDLE calls in respond to ^C) not interrupting time.sleep(n) in main thread*. I tested on Windows, don't know yet about OP. Since there is no Expert's Index listing for thread (or threading), I am asking here for someone who knows anything to take a look.

* >>> time.sleep(10) <hit ^C immediately> <debug print after interruptmain() shows immediately> <... remainder of 10 seconds pass> KeyboardInterrupt I get similar behaviour under Linux. I don't have the debug print, but the KeyboardInterrupt doesn't interrupt the sleep until the 10 seconds are up.

Looking at the implementation, _thread.interrupt_main just calls PyErr_SetInterrupt. It doesn’t appear to send a signal. I played with “strace” and couldn’t see any evidence of a signal. I guess it just sets a flag that will be polled. To actually interrupt the “sleep” call, you might need to use “pthread_kill” or similar (at least on Unix).

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