How do you kill a Thread in Java?

Question

How do you kill a java.lang.Thread in Java?

Answer 1

There is no way to gracefully kill a thread.

You can try to interrupt the thread, one commons strategy is to use a poison pill to message the thread to stop itself

public class CancelSupport {
    public static class CommandExecutor implements Runnable {
            private BlockingQueue queue;
            public static final String POISON_PILL  = “stopnow”;
            public CommandExecutor(BlockingQueue queue) {
                    this.queue=queue;
            }
            @Override
            public void run() {
                    boolean stop=false;
                    while(!stop) {
                            try {
                                    String command=queue.take();
                                    if(POISON_PILL.equals(command)) {
                                            stop=true;
                                    } else {
                                            // do command
                                            System.out.println(command);
                                    }
                            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                                    stop=true;
                            }
                    }
                    System.out.println(“Stopping execution”);
            }

    }

}

BlockingQueue queue=new LinkedBlockingQueue();
Thread t=new Thread(new CommandExecutor(queue));
queue.put(“hello”);
queue.put(“world”);
t.start();
Thread.sleep(1000);
queue.put(“stopnow”);

http://anandsekar.github.io/cancel-support-for-threads/