Can I kill a thread that is waiting for TCP connection to come in?

Question

I have a application where a thread is listening for TCP connections, and will need to be killed. What is the best way to do this? I know that Thread.stop is deprecated, is interrupting the thread enough?

Answer 1

If you have a reference to a ServerSocket you can call its close() method. This will cause the Thread waiting on accept() to throw a SocketException.

Note that you probably don't want to expose a reference to the socket itself; you should probably add a method to your server code named shutdownServer() or similar which does this itself.

Answer 2

Generally - yes, you should use Thread.interrupt() and a shared variable. In your particular example, you can just close the Socket to cause the thread to return immediately. Read about it here.