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If I have a thread in an infinite loop, is there a way to terminate it when the main program ends (for example, when I press Ctrl+C)?
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All the threads in your process will be terminated when you return from main() .
A thread automatically terminates when it returns from its entry-point routine. A thread can also explicitly terminate itself or terminate any other thread in the process, using a mechanism called cancelation.
Exiting the main thread will not result in the process exiting if there are any other threads still active. According to the old-fashioned model of how processes exit, a process was in control of all its threads and could mediate the shutdown of those threads, thereby controlling the shutdown of the process.
Using a hidden function _stop() : In order to kill a thread, we use hidden function _stop() this function is not documented but might disappear in the next version of python.
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
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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
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