Stopping a thread

We have to start a thread to actually make it do something by calling the start() method, so intuitively, we would expect there to be a matching stop() method, but there is no such thing. In this recipe, we will learn how to run a thread as a background task, which is called a daemon. When closing the main thread, which is our GUI, all daemons will automatically be stopped as well.

Getting ready

When we call methods in a thread, we can also pass arguments and keyword arguments to the method. We start this recipe by doing exactly that.

How to do it…

By adding args=[8] to the thread constructor and modifying the targeted method to expect arguments, we can pass arguments to the threaded methods. The parameter to args has to be a sequence, so we will wrap our number in a Python list:

    def method_in_a_thread(self, num_of_loops=10):
        print('Hi, how are you?')
        for idx in range(num_of_loops):
            sleep(5)
            self.scrol.insert(tk.INSERT, str(idx) +...