How terminate Python thread without checking flag continuously

multithreading, python, python-2.7, python-multithreading, subprocess

Solution

For your particular example, it's probably easiest to terminate the thread by terminating the subprocess it spawns using the `Popen` object's `terminate()` method...

class My_Thread(threading.Thread):

    def __init__(self):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.process = None

    def run(self):
        print "Starting " + self.name
        cmd = [ "bash", 'process.sh']
        self.process = p = subprocess.Popen(cmd,
                     stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
                     stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
        for line in iter(p.stdout.readline, b''):
            print ("-- " + line.rstrip())
        print "Exiting " + self.name

    def stop(self):
        print "Trying to stop thread "
        if self.process is not None:
            self.process.terminate()
            self.process = None

thr = My_Thread()
thr.start()
time.sleep(30)
thr.stop()
thr.join()

...causing a `SIGTERM` to be sent to `bash`, and the next call to `p.stdout.readline()` to raise an exception, which will terminate the thread.

Problem

Original source

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