Always call Thread.currentThread().interrupt(); when catching an InterruptedException?

Question

This IBM developerWorks article states:

“The one time it is acceptable to swallow an interrupt is when you know the thread is about to exit. This scenario only occurs when the class calling the interruptible method is part of a Thread, not a Runnable […]”.

I always implemented Runnable for my threads by now. Giving a Runnable implementation like this:

public class View() implements Runnable {
    @Overload
    public void run(){
        Thread worker = new Thread(new Worker());
        worker.start();
        do{
            try{
                TimeUnit.SECONDS.sleep(3);
                updateView();
            }catch(InterruptedException e){
                worker.interrupt();
                // Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
                return;
            }
        }while(true);
    }

    protected void updateView(){
        // …
    }
}

Is it really necessary to call Thread.currentThread().interrupt(); right before my return; statement? Doesn’t return; perform a clean enaugh exit already? What’s the benefit of calling it? The article states that it should be done because otherwise “[…] code higher up on the call stack won't be able to find out about it […]”. What’s the benefit of a thread in Thread.State.TERMINATED with interrupted flag set over one without it upon application shutdown? Can you give me an example where code outside the Runnable inspects the interrupted flag for a sensible reason?

BTW, is it a better code design to extend Thread instead of implementing Runnable?

Answer 1

It resets the interrupt flag. This JavaSpecialists newsletter covers this confusing topic in more detail.

In my example, after I caught the InterruptedException, I used Thread.currentThread().interrupt() to immediately interrupted the thread again. Why is this necessary? When the exception is thrown, the interrupted flag is cleared, so if you have nested loops, you will cause trouble in the outer loops

So if you know that your code is not going to be used by another component, then you don't need to re-interrupt. However I really wouldn't make that minor optimisation. Who knows how your code is going to be used/reused in the future (even by copy/paste) and consequently I would reset the flag for every interrupt.