python socket object accept time out

Question

Question: Is there some sort of time out or interrupt to the socket.accept() function in python?

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Info:

I have a program that has a child thread bound to a port and constantly accepting and tending and passing them to a queue for the main thread. Right now I'm trying to get the child thread to interrupt so it can deconstruct appropriately. I think it is possible for me to just simply stop the child thread and have the parent deconstruct the child, but there are other times where I want to be able to return early form accept so I just decided that would be the most useful approach.

So, is there a way that I can have a time out or cancel the accept method so the thread can return w/o having something connect to it first?

Answer 1

You can use settimeout() as in this example:

import socket

tcpServer = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) 
tcpServer.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1)
tcpServer.settimeout(0.2) # timeout for listening
tcpServer.bind(('0.0.0.0', 10000)) # IP and PORT
tcpServer.listen(1)

stopped = False
while not stopped:
  try: 
    (conn, (ip, port)) = tcpServer.accept() 
  except socket.timeout:
    pass
  except:
    raise
  else:
    # work with the connection, create a thread etc.
    ...

The loop will run until stopped is set to true and then exit after (at most) the timeout you have set. (In my application I pass the connection handle to a newly created thread and continue the loop in order to be able to accept further simultaneous connections.)