How can I immediately terminate a Thread? (Not interrupt)

Question

This is not a question about how to cleanly terminate a thread, ie by calling interrupt on it and having the thread respond appropriately. I cannot modify code the thread is executing in any way.

I specifically want to immediately terminate a Thread, I don't care at all what state things are left in. I know something similar is possible using Thread.stop, however this actually throws a ThreadDeath exception, and for the Thread to terminate this exception cannot be caught. However the code I am dealing with catches this exception and is not rethrowing it.

Thread.destroy() seemed to be what I was looking for, however this method was never implemented. Is there any other way of achieving this?

Answer 1

I believe that there's no way in Java to just kill off a thread like you're describing. As you note in a comment, interrupt won't do what you want. If the thread is executing, it just sets a flag and it's up to the thread to notice it. if the thread is waiting or sleeping, it will throw an InterruptedException.

The only way I can imagine doing what you're describing is to kill the process in which the thread is running. (E.g., call System.exit(int).)