Interrput a thread

[Roy Smith]

In article 
<2ebc11a5-1b45-4faa-97b9-c84f0db015a4 at k22g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>,
 Fuzzyman <fuzzyman at gmail.com> wrote:
 
> It is unsafe to terminate an os level thread at an arbitrary point
> because it may be executing code in a critical section.
> [...]
> The standard advice is to use a flag and do manual checking to abort
> threads. This only works for fine grained operations and *doesn't*
> work for very coarse grained operations or where there aren't
> convenient places to check the flag.

Another possibility is to not use threads!  If you

1) Need asynchronous operation

2) Need iterruptability

3) Can't poll for an "please stop" signal

You should look at running your "thread" as a separate process, which 
you can send a kill signal to when you want it to go away.  You can then 
communicate with it via pipes, sockets, shared memory segments, whatever.

Threads are a wonderful invention, but they are not a panacea for all 
possible parallelism tasks.  Sometimes they're just the wrong tool.