Make thread go to finally after certain time has passed

Question

I have a thread which may get stuck and keep running forever. Thus after a certain amount of time, I would like it to stop executing, go to the finally method to do cleanup, and then die. How would I go about doing this safely? Thanks.

My first thought on how to do this was to make a child thread and have that sleep and then do the cleanup. But then when the parent thread is still trying to run and it can't so it outputs an error.

Answer 1

Refactor your code into a Callable and use an ExecutorService to get a Future. Then use get with a timeout, which throws a TimeoutException if not done by then. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/2275596/53897 for a full example.