How do I abort a socket.recv() from another thread in Python

Question

I have a main thread that waits for connection. It spawns client threads that will echo the response from the client (telnet in this case). But say that I want to close down all

Answer 1

I must apologize for the comments below. The earlier comment by @Matt Anderson works. I had made a mistake when trying it out which led to my post below.

Using timeout is not a very good solution. It may seem that waking up for an instant and then going back to sleep is no big deal, but I have seen it greatly affect the performance of an application. You have an operation that for the most part wants to block until data is available and thus sleep forever. However, if you want to abort for some reason, like shutting down your application, then the trick is how to get out. For sockets, you can use select and listen on two sockets. Your primary one, and a special shutdown one. Creating the shutdown one though is a bit of a pain. You have to create it. You have to get the listening socket to accept it. You have to keep track of both ends of this pipe. I have the same issue with the Synchronized Queue class. There however, you can at least insert a dummy object into the queue to wake up the get(). This requires that the dummy object not look like your normal data though. I sometimes wish Python had something like the Windows API WaitForMultipleObjects.