> I don't know the "standard" way, but perhaps you can get some ideas from > this recent > thread:http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/... >
I had a quick read through that thread. I think i will need some more time to think about what they are saying in there though. They seem to talking about killing a python thread kind of similar to the C functions TerminateThread() in windows or pthread_cancel() on UNIX which are not suitable for my purpose. > You might try using the PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc function (from the > Python C API) to inject a KeyboardInterrupt exception into the Read thread > - but I don't know if it will work at all, the execution might be blocked > waiting for an I/O call to complete, and never return to Python code... > Unfortunately that is the problem. It is blocking in a IO system call and i want to force it to exit that with an error, hopefully causing a Python exception. I looked at what you mentioned and it is described a bit here too: http://sebulba.wikispaces.com/recipe+thread2 I really need a python mechanism for interrupting blocking system calls. have dealt with this sort of thing before in C/C++ on windows and UNIX. For UNIX it is really a matter of sending a signal to the process (SIGINTR), the main thread which is the only one in Python to accept signals (others as i understand are masked) will get the signal and and return with an EINTR breaking out of the blocking read hopefully a python exception of Interrupted IO or KeyboardInterrupt. Note that this only works for the one thread , but that is all i need. For windows, it is possible to do a similar thing using: GenerateConsoleCtrlEvent(CTRL_BREAK_EVENT, 0) with which behaves a bit like a UNIX signal and i assume is what causes the KeyboardInterrupt in the first place. The problem i have is how do I achieve this in python? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
