Put a reference onto a thread

[fedai gandjaliyev]

Hello!
I'm new to threads and I've written a small application which sends
ping commands to the spefified host! The class responsible for that
is like this one

private class PingMachine extends Thread{

PingMachine(String machine)
{
host = machine;
}

public void run(){
while(true){
try{
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("ping -t " + host);
InputStream in = p.getInputStream();
InputStreamReader rin = new InputStreamReader(in);
BufferedReader bin = new BufferedReader(rin);
String s;
System.out.println(new Date());
while ((s=bin.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println(s);
}

}catch(Exception ex){
ex.printStackTrace();
}

}

}

}

For each button click I start a new thread

PingMachine pinger = new PingMachine(hostField.getText().trim());
pinger.start();

What I want to ask is that how can I keep refernces to each newly created thread and destroy it when no londer needed?
Best Regards, Fedai!

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

You can keep references to them the same way you'd keep references to anything else; when you create the PingMachine object, store it into an ArrayList member variable that you keep just for this purpose.

To make the threads destroy-able, you'll need to change them a little bit. Add a boolean member variable to PingMachine, and add it to the loop condition in run -- i.e., run only while it's true. Then add a "stopPinging()" method that sets this variable to false. Also in the run method, after the "while" loop, add a Process.destroy() call to kill the ping process.

[fedai gandjaliyev]

That would really help me very much!
But this is what comes out of this

private class PingMachine extends Thread{

private boolean isRunnable = false;

PingMachine(String machine)
{
host = machine;
}

private void startPinging(){
isRunnable = true;
}
private void stopPinging(){
isRunnable = false;
}

public void run(){
while(isRunnable){
try{
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("ping -t " + host);
InputStream in = p.getInputStream();
InputStreamReader rin = new InputStreamReader(in);
BufferedReader bin = new BufferedReader(rin);
String s;
System.out.println(new Date());
while ((s=bin.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println(s);
}

}catch(Exception ex){
ex.printStackTrace();
}

}

}

}

And I have two buttons
//On start button
pinger = new PingMachine("localhost");
pinger.start();
//On stop button
//This is the same pinger
pinger.stopPinging();
But when the method "stopPinging()"
have this form
private void stopPinging(){
isRunnable = false;
}
the thread stops
Why assigning "false" to the variable isRunnable
doesnt stop the thread?
Thank you!

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Because you've got two while loops; you need to combine them into one:

while (isRunning && ((s=bin.readLine()) != null)) ...

Also, note that since the variable isRunning() is being read and written by more than one thread, access to it should be synchronized, or it's possible the read loop might not see the changes. Just make stopPinging() synchronized, and create a synchronized isPinging() method that returns the value of the variable and use that in the above -- i.e.,

while (isPinging() && ((s=bin.readLine()) != null)) ...

[fedai gandjaliyev]

That really helped me much!
Thanks!