Eric Sosman wrote:
[...]
If the victim thread isn't cooperating (by checking a
"stop now" flag occasionally or some such), the only way I
can think of to stop it safely is System.exit().
System.exit waits for all non-daemon-threads to stop.
So if the Thread you want to kill is not a daemon-thread
and it ignores all attempts to stop, you're screwed.
Are you sure? The Javadoc for System and for Runtime
don't mention any such thing. There's lots about shutdown
hooks and finalizers and recursive calls to exit(), but
nothing about waiting for other threads.
Hmmm: If you're right, this program will never terminate:
public class RunForever implements Runnable {
public static void main(String[] unused) {
demonic();
new Thread(new RunForever()).start();
stall(3500);
System.exit(0);
}
public void run() {
demonic();
for (;
{
stall(1000);
}
}
private static void demonic() {
Thread self = Thread.currentThread();
System.err.println(self.getName()
+ (self.isDaemon() ? " is " : " is not ")
+ "a daemon");
}
private static void stall(long time) {
String name = Thread.currentThread().getName();
try {
Thread.sleep(time);
System.err.println(name
+ " awoke at " + System.currentTimeMillis());
} catch (InterruptedException ex) {
System.err.println(name
+ " interrupted at " + System.currentTimeMillis());
}
}
}
On my machine, it terminates as expected. Bug in my Java?
