Stopping a thread from the calling process

[P.J.W.S. Vrijlandt]

Gordon wrote:

> Scott Barron asks:
> 
> > is there an easy and fairly portable way of doing this?
> 
> If you mean "interrupting" or "killing", no. WIth good reason. 
> OS level threads are often "light weight" processes. Generally 
> what's been trimmed is all the stuff dealing with reclaming 
> resources, releasing locks etc. on thread death. So if you 
> "kill" a thread, you're likely to be leaving your process in an 
> indeterminate state.
> 
> The normal idiom is to ask politely - have the thread 
> periodically check some variable to see if it should stop.

How would you do this if the thread-to-be-stopped is waiting for 
(keyboard-) input?

e.g. in telnetlib we have:

    def mt_interact(self):
        """Multithreaded version of interact()."""
        import thread
        thread.start_new_thread(self.listener, ())
        while 1:
            line = sys.stdin.readline()
            if not line:
                break
            self.write(line)

    def listener(self):
        """Helper for mt_interact() -- this executes in the other  
        thread."""         
        while 1:                        
            try:
                data = self.read_eager()
            except EOFError:
                print '*** Connection closed by remote host ***'
                return
            if data:
                sys.stdout.write(data)
            else:
                sys.stdout.flush()

mt_interact should break out of its loop when EOFError occurs within 
listener.

(also note that select on input won't work on win32, and looping on 
keypressed seems rather processor-unfriendly)

BTW: Would this be better rewritten (for this reason or another) 
using threading? 

Patrick
Met vriendelijke groet,

Patrick Vrijlandt