How to exit a multithreaded program?

Question

I was just messing around with threading in python, wrote this basic IM thingy [code at bottom]

I noticed that when I kill the program with C-c it doesn\'t exit, it

Answer 1

Look at the Python library source for SocketServer.py, in particular the implementation of server_forever() to see how a server implements a quit. It uses select() to poll the server socket for new connections and tests a quit flag. Here's a hack on your source to use SocketServer, and I added a quit flag to Shout(). It will run the Shout and Listen threads for 5 seconds and then stop them.

import socket
import SocketServer
import threading
import time

class Handler(SocketServer.StreamRequestHandler):
    def handle(self):
        print str(self.client_address) + ": " + self.request.recv(250)
        self.request.send("got it\n")

class Listen(threading.Thread):
    def run(self):
        self.server = SocketServer.TCPServer(('',2727),Handler)
        self.server.serve_forever()
    def stop(self):
        self.server.shutdown()

class Shout(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.quit = False
    def run(self):
        while not self.quit:
            conn = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
            conn.connect(('localhost', 2727))
            conn.send('sending\n')
            print conn.recv(100)
            conn.close()
    def stop(self):
        self.quit = True

listen = Listen()
listen.start()
shout = Shout()
shout.start()

time.sleep(5)

shout.stop()
listen.stop()