My thought was to use threading.settrace() and set my own trace function for every thread that is started. That way every thread will have to pass through the trace function in oder to continue executing and it doesn’t matter where in the code it is at or going. In my trace function I was going to add an Event that it would wait on if I want to pause execution of the thread, or check something to make it through an execption to exit out of the thread.

I was in the process of searching for a way to find out if a thread died because of an Exception when I ran across a post here: http://www.dlevel.com/blogs/alex/20

What they have done is added a terminate() method to the Thread class in the threading library. This will throw a SystemExit exception and quitely terminate the thread. Just take the code and paste it into a new module and use that Thread class as opposed to the threading.Thread class.

I agree with what he says about using this. Obviously it is not very safe to do this but in some cases you really need a way to terminate a thread and if you are careful it can work out ok.

Here is some code I played with:


>>> class T:
... build_location = None
... def get_location(self):
...    return self.build_location
...
>>> t = T()
>>> print t.get_location()
None
>>> T.build_location = "hello"
>>> print t.get_location()
hello
>>> t.build_location = "there"
>>> print t.get_location()
there
>>> print T.build_location
hello
>>> T.build_location = "hello"
>>> print t.get_location()
there
>>>

So, what I did was set an attribute on the class level that everyone can see without an instance of the class. When I create an instance it can see that attribute just like I can from just doing T.build_location. When I change the static variable then the instance sees that change as well (which is what I was hoping for).

Now, the interesting part is that if I use an instance of the class to change the variable, that variable becomes local to that instance as you can see above when I printed the class’s T.build_location. Now I tried to set the class level attribute back to “hello” and that works but now it does not change what the instance sees!

This is not any earth shattering news but I thought it was interesting when I saw it.