on muliple cpu machine - surely there are > 1 currently running thread. how does the method Thread.currentthread() work? you would expect it to return a list of currently running threads.
Tsrif, why do you think there should always be >1 threads running on a multiprocessor system? There are of course some background threads running in the JVM which you have on every system but I think you're talking about the threads running your own code. And there are only the threads you would have on a single processor system which means usually just the main thread your code is automatically running in.
So your applications don't necessarily run multi-threaded just because they are running on a multiprocessor system. The main difference is that a multiprocessor system has the ability to run multiple threads really in parallel - in contrast to a single processor system which has to use some scheduler mechanisms for parallelizing threads. And perhaps on a multiprocessor systems you'll see more errors regarding the visibility of shared data because of caching effects etc. if your code isn't really thread-safe.
how does the method Thread.currentthread() work? you would expect it to return a list of currently running threads
Yes, it is true. In a multicore / multiprocessor system it is possible to have more than one currently running thread.
But that is not the purpose of the method. The purpose of the method is to return the Thread object that is running the current code that calls the method -- and the purpose of that is to write thread specific code.
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