threading.Thread vs. signal.signal

[Jack Orenstein]

I'd like to create a program that invokes a function once a second,
and terminates when the user types ctrl-c. So I created a signal
handler, created a threading.Thread which does the invocation every
second, and started the thread. The signal handler seems to be
ineffective. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? This is on Fedora FC4 and
Python 2.4.1. The code appears below.

If I do the while ... sleep in the main thread, then the signal
handler works as expected. (This isn't really a satisfactory
implementation because the function called every second might
take a significant fraction of a second to execute.)

Jack Orenstein


import sys
import signal
import threading
import datetime
import time

class metronome(threading.Thread):
     def __init__(self, interval, function):
         threading.Thread.__init__(self)
         self.interval = interval
         self.function = function
         self.done = False

     def cancel(self):
         print '>>> cancel'
         self.done = True

     def run(self):
         while not self.done:
             time.sleep(self.interval)
             if self.done:
                 print '>>> break!'
                 break
             else:
                 self.function()

def ctrl_c_handler(signal, frame):
     print '>>> ctrl c'
     global t
     t.cancel()
     sys.stdout.close()
     sys.stderr.close()
     sys.exit(0)

signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, ctrl_c_handler)

def hello():
     print datetime.datetime.now()

t = metronome(1, hello)
t.start()