repeat something in a thread, but stop when the program stops

[Peter Otten]

Harald Armin Massa wrote:

> I would like to have a way to stop that thread in a automatic way.
> 
> one obvious solution would be:
> 
> import time
> from threading import Thread
> import Queue
> 
> class updater(Thread):
>     stopper=Queue.Queue()
>     def run(self):
>         self.timegone=0
>         while self.stopper.empty():
>              time.sleep(0.5)
>              self.timegone+=1
>              if self.timegone>=600:
>                  print "you waited, time passed, I will do updates"
>                  do_updates()
>                  self.timegone=0
>         print "updater stopped also"

As of 2.3 (I think) Queue.get() accepts a timeout parameter. You could
change the above to

from Queue import Queue, Empty

class updater(Thread):
    stopper = Queue()
    def run(self):
        while True:
             do_updates()
             try:
                self.stopper.get(True, 600)
             except Empty:
                pass
             else:
                break

and the sleeping thread should immediately wake up when it gets the stop
notification.

Peter