threading.Timer to kill long running task with basic cleanup control

Question

I\'d like to monitor a process and auto-kill it if it runs more than N seconds.

I\'m editing this question in response to the suggestion that it\'s a duplicate of: Is t

Answer 1

So... I think may have solved this by combining 10 different SO posts in a way that I've not seen on any single SO post... please critique and tell me if this is dumb or brilliant... ;-)

[Because this question is very closely related to at least two others... I've posted my proposed solution as an independent answer in the both related threads: 1 2]

import threading
import time
import atexit

def do_work():

  i = 0
  @atexit.register
  def goodbye():
    print ("'CLEANLY' kill sub-thread with value: %s [THREAD: %s]" %
           (i, threading.currentThread().ident))

  while True:
    print i
    i += 1
    time.sleep(1)

t = threading.Thread(target=do_work)
t.daemon = True
t.start()

def after_timeout():
  print "KILL MAIN THREAD: %s" % threading.currentThread().ident
  raise SystemExit

threading.Timer(2, after_timeout).start()

Yields:

0
1
KILL MAIN THREAD: 140013208254208
'CLEANLY' kill sub-thread with value: 2 [THREAD: 140013674317568]

I think that's the secret sauce that will work for my application. My sub-thread is cleaned up properly now after a fixed amount of time with no looping flag check nonsense within said sub-thread... AND I appear to even get a small glimmer of control in the subthread where I can do some final state checking and cleanup.