Does killing the thread kill its parent process?

Hi,

If i want to kill the thread of a parent process, but its killing the whole parent process. This seems to be obvious thing as threads does not have different PIDs but before proceeding further, i would like you to read my first thread http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=567347

So, as per this thread, i can see that doing ps -efm shows me that a different PID has been allocated to the thread. So, taking that PID i tried to kill it, but it was killing the parent process?

Can anyone tell me where i am doing wrong and then how can i achieve my objective?

pthreads programming requires a certain amount of cooperation between threads. There's cleanup code and other stuff going on under the hood that would get messed up if you were able simply to kill a thread.

The only way to kill a thread is, within your program, calling pthread_cancel(). Even then it's complex and often dangerous.

The best way in the long run is to write the code so that it cleanly does a pthread_exit() if it senses that you want it to stop.

Hope this helps.

Ok...
So what you mean is that its a construct imposed by the kernel that we cant kill the pthreads just like that.

Each individual thread in a program using pthreads is part of the same process (you can not signal individual threads). You have to code your program to do any thread management you want done.

Quoth piyush.kansal:

So what you mean is that its a construct imposed by the kernel that we cant kill the pthreads just like that.

No, what I mean is that it's a detail of pthreads itself, for your own protection. If you were able to kill a thread, then the coordination between threads would be broken, and your program would misbehave.

No, what I mean is that it's a detail of pthreads itself, for your own protection. If you were able to kill a thread, then the coordination between threads would be broken, and your program would misbehave.

Ok, thanks a lot.

Each individual thread in a program using pthreads is part of the same process (you can not signal individual threads). You have to code your program to do any thread management you want done.

I agree with you. In fact, I was told the same thing by other members also. But, the problem is that since we can't catch SIGKILL so even if I want to implement my own thread killing mechanism, I am helpless

So, I just thought of consulting you guys. Anyways thanks a lot

Actually, you can use another SIG eg SIGUSR1 to mean kill a thr when you catch it.