Stop/Interrupt threads blocked on waiting input from socket

Question

As the title says I need a way to stop or interrupt a thread that is blocked waiting on an input from the socket.

Answer 1

You could simply close() the IO stream/socket from another thread. Then, you could check on a volatile boolean field if the resulting IOException is due the close or something else. I think the close might result in an java.net.SocketException: Socket closed exception.

Answer 2

Thread.interrupt() should be the method you're looking for. Be sure that your input-accessing methods also check for InterruptedException and ClosedByInterruptException.

Also look at the corresponding page in the Sun Concurrency Tutorial, as another solution suggests.