Deleting a threaded timer class?

Question

Imagine I have this code (not written the actual timer yet):

class Timer(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self, seconds):
        self.runTime = seconds
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
    def run(self):
        time.sleep(self.runTime)
        #do some other function
        print 'Finished'
t = Timer(60)
t.start()

Once the run() method has finished running, is there some way to stop the thread, and delete the class instance?

Answer 1

The run() method is everything that runs in a thread, so when it has finished nothing is running anymore. Then t.is_alive() will return False . You can then delete the instance using del t , but that will just remove your reference to it. The actual deleting will be done by garbage collector some time later.