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Joining Threads
In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use the join() method to bring all your threads together before the main thread exits. If you download the sample code, you can get your own copy of 05-join.py:
To learn more, you can also check out the documentation.
00:00
In the previous lesson, we saw how we can add daemon=True to create a thread that will be killed once our main program completes. In this lesson, we’re going to learn about how we can have our main thread wait for other threads to finish before it completes, and this waiting for other threads is what we call join.
00:22
I’m actually going to use the code from the previous lesson, I’m just going to copy all this code into a new file called 05-join,
00:32
and we’re going to make a slight modification here. We’re going to not make this a daemon thread because we don’t want that behavior in this example, and we’re going to add one more function here.
00:44
Before we do that, let’s go ahead and execute this program. I’ve saved the file, now I’m going to drop down into the terminal, 05-join, and we’ll go back.
00:55
We’ve seen this before. t has started, t is sleeping while we’re seeing main ended here,
01:03
and then we have myfunc ended. This is the non-daemonic behavior, if you will. Without the daemon=True we actually get main ended before myfunc ended, and we had t finish.
01:20
We didn’t kill t using the daemon=True flag. So, we’ve taken that away. We have t.start(). But what we want to do here is we want to actually have myfunc ended before main ended. In other words, we want t to finish before our main thread finishes.
01:42
We can do that by adding a function call to .join() here, on t. .join() is going to tell the main thread to wait for t to finish before continuing and finishing the program.
01:59 Let’s clear the screen and run that again.
02:03
We’ve added .join(), now let’s see what happens. We’ve got main started, right here in line 10. We created our thread, we started it, and we called .join().
02:14
Now, once t was started, it dropped up here—we saw myfunc started with realpython— this is coming from the t thread.
02:22
And then it slept—as we saw, we were hanging out there for 10 seconds. And then it printed myfunc ended. This print statement came from t and then we had t.join() called from the main thread, so that told the main thread, “Hey, I want you to wait until t finishes and then join the thread back with the main thread.” So then we see main ended.
02:46
This is basically the same behavior as if we were to just delete these three lines and call myfunc() explicitly with 'realpython'.
03:01
It is bringing more complexity into it, but we’re going to build upon that concept, and I just want you to see how we can use t.join() to have the main thread wait for other threads to finish before finishing itself.
kiran on Aug. 28, 2020
difference between join() & demon thread?
Bartosz Zaczyński RP Team on Aug. 31, 2020
Just a side note: it’s not “demon” but a “daemon” thread.
.join() is a method on the threading.Thread class. You can call it from another thread to wait until the other one finishes its execution. It doesn’t matter whether you’re calling .join() on a regular or a daemon thread.
Regular threads running in the background will prevent Python from exiting even after the main thread has finished. On the other hand, daemon threads don’t have such power. They’ll stop abruptly when the main thread is done. For this reason, you should never use resources that require cleanup, such as files, in daemon threads.
Bin on Feb. 13, 2023
There is a mistake in chapter “Join threads”. time 01:22, I thould be “We didn’t kill t using the Daemon=False flag.” or “We didn’t kill t without the Daemon=True flag.”
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gnraju24 on July 30, 2020
course is going great till now. thanks for explanation with code