How to Cancel a Thread using C Programming?

In the previous tutorial, we discussed how to create a thread in an application. In this tutorial, the following program shows how a running thread can be cancelled from the main thread.

Source code to test thread cancellation

#include <stdio.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <pthread.h> void *my_thread_function(void *arg); int main() { int result; pthread_t my_thread_a; void *thread_result; result = pthread_create(&my_thread_a, NULL, my_thread_function, NULL); if (result != 0) { perror("Thread creation failed"); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } sleep(1); printf("Canceling thread...\n"); result = pthread_cancel(my_thread_a); if (result != 0) { perror("Thread cancelation failed"); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } printf("Waiting for thread to finish...\n"); result = pthread_join(my_thread_a, &thread_result); if (result != 0) { perror("Thread join failed"); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } exit(EXIT_SUCCESS); }

Happy Exploring!