Re: Best Practice For Killing Thread?

At 10:39 -0800 11/3/03, Steve Schein wrote:
>I am using Perl v5.8 w/ithreads and have a thread which is a UDP
>listening socket that listens for messages in a perpetual read loop.
>There are times that this socket needs to be broken down along with the
>corresponding thread.
>What is the current best practice for killing a single thread with
>ithreads?

The best way would be to use a shared array or shared hash (keyed to 
thread id) with a flag being set.  The thread will then need to check 
that flag every so often and shut itself down when the flag is set.


>If the answer is to kill the process, please suggest ways to obtain the
>pid.

Threads only have pids on Linux.  This is used by Thread::Signal (my 
version, from CPAN), which provides an API for sending signals to 
threads.  However, an exit() from a thread will stop all threads.  If 
that's the way you want to do it, you'd also need Thread::Exit (also 
by me, from CPAN).

You may also need to switch off safe signal behaviour if a thread is 
stuck in some kind of network operation.


Hope this helps.


Liz