How to force a thread to stop

[Gerhard Fiedler]

On 2006-07-25 13:30:22, Carl J. Van Arsdall wrote:

>> Running os.system() in multiple threads strikes me as kind of whacked.
>> Won't they all compete to read and write stdin/stdout simultaneously? 
>> 
> Unfortunately this is due to the nature of the problem I am tasked with 
> solving.  I have a large computing farm, these os.system calls are often 
> things like ssh that do work on locations remote from the initial python 
> task.  

[...]

> Again, the problem I'm trying to solve doesn't work like this.  I've been
> working on a framework to be run across a large number of distributed
> nodes (here's where you throw out the "duh, use a distributed
> technology" in my face).  The thing is, I'm only writing the framework,
> the framework will work with modules, lots of them, which will be
> written by other people.  Its going to be impossible to get people to
> write hundreds of modules that constantly check for status messages.  

Doesn't this sound like a case for using processes instead of threads?
Where you don't have control over the thread, you can use a process and get
the separation you need to be able to kill this task.

Alternatively you could possibly provide a base class for the threads that
handles the things you need every thread to handle. They'd not have to
write it then; they'd not even have to know too much about it.

Gerhard