Interrupt a sleeping thread

Question

Trying to interrupt a running thread, in this example, t1, which is executed by a thread in a thread pool.

t2 is the one that sends the interrupt.

I'm unable to stop the running t1, t1 does not get InterruptedException.

What am I missing?

    Executor exec1 = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(1);

    // task to be interrupted
    Runnable runnable = new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            try {
                System.out.println("starting uninterruptible task 1");
                Thread.sleep(4000);
                System.out.println("stopping uninterruptible task 1");
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                assertFalse("This line should never be reached.", true);
                e.printStackTrace();
            }               
        }           
    };
    final Thread t1 = new Thread(runnable);


    // task to send interrupt
    Runnable runnable2 = new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            try {
                Thread.sleep(1000);
                t1.interrupt();
                System.out.println("task 2 - Trying to stop task 1");
                Thread.sleep(5000);

            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }               
        }           
    };
    Thread t2 = new Thread(runnable2);

    exec1.execute(t1);
            t2.start();
    t2.join();

Answer 1

Seems like you misunderstand threads and Executors. You create two threads object for two runnables, but start only one of them (t2), t1 you pass to Executor to run inside it. But executor does not need Thread to be supplied -- it just need Runnable implementation. Executor itself is a thread pool (usually, but it's not required), and it just creates (and pool) threads inside it. It sees you thread just as simple Runnable (which is Thread implements). So you actualy send interrupt to the thread which was never started.

If you really want to make your code works, you should remove Executor, and just start both threads explicitly.