How to terminate a thread when main program ends?
If you make your worker threads daemon threads, they will die when all your non-daemon threads (e.g. the main thread) have exited.
http://docs.python.org/library/threading.html#threading.Thread.daemon
Check this question. The correct answer has great explanation on how to terminate threads the right way:Is there any way to kill a Thread in Python?
To make the thread stop on Keyboard Interrupt signal (ctrl+c) you can catch the exception "KeyboardInterrupt" and cleanup before exiting. Like this:
try: start_thread() except (KeyboardInterrupt, SystemExit): cleanup_stop_thread() sys.exit()
This way you can control what to do whenever the program is abruptly terminated.
You can also use the built-in signal module that lets you setup signal handlers (in your specific case the SIGINT signal): http://docs.python.org/library/signal.html
Try with enabling the sub-thread as daemon-thread.
For Instance:
Recommended:
from threading import Threadt = Thread(target=<your-method>)t.daemon = True # This thread dies when main thread (only non-daemon thread) exits.t.start()
Inline:
t = Thread(target=<your-method>, daemon=True).start()
Old API:
t.setDaemon(True)t.start()
When your main thread terminates ("i.e. when I press Ctrl+C"), other threads will also be killed by the instructions above.