Thread that I can pause and resume?

Question

I\'m trying to create a thread, that does stuff in the background. I need to be able to effectively \'pause\' it when I need to and \'resume\' it again later. Also, if the t

Answer 1

Use threading.Event instead of a boolean variable, and add another event for busy state:

def __init__(self):
    ...
    self.can_run = threading.Event()
    self.thing_done = threading.Event()
    self.thing_done.set()
    self.can_run.set()    

def run(self):
    while True:
        self.can_run.wait()
        try:
            self.thing_done.clear()
            print 'do the thing'
        finally:
            self.thing_done.set()

def pause(self):
    self.can_run.clear()
    self.thing_done.wait()

def resume(self):
    self.can_run.set()

edit: previous answer was wrong, I fixed it and changed variable names to be clear