How do you kill a Thread in Java?

Question

How do you kill a java.lang.Thread in Java?

Answer 1

'Killing a thread' is not the right phrase to use. Here is one way we can implement graceful completion/exit of the thread on will:

Runnable which I used:

class TaskThread implements Runnable {

    boolean shouldStop;

    public TaskThread(boolean shouldStop) {
        this.shouldStop = shouldStop;
    }

    @Override
    public void run() {

        System.out.println("Thread has started");

        while (!shouldStop) {
            // do something
        }

        System.out.println("Thread has ended");

    }

    public void stop() {
        shouldStop = true;
    }

}

The triggering class:

public class ThreadStop {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        System.out.println("Start");

        // Start the thread
        TaskThread task = new TaskThread(false);
        Thread t = new Thread(task);
        t.start();

        // Stop the thread
        task.stop();

        System.out.println("End");

    }

}