I have a main thread that waits for connection. It spawns client threads that will echo the response from the client (telnet in this case). But say that I want to close down all sockets and all threads after some time, like after 1 connection. How would I do? If I do clientSocket.close() from the main thread, it won't stop doing the recv. It will only stop if I first send something through telnet, then it will fail doing further sends and recvs.

My code look like this:

# Echo server program
import socket
from threading import Thread
import time

class ClientThread(Thread):
    def __init__(self, clientSocket):
            Thread.__init__(self)
            self.clientSocket = clientSocket

    def run(self):
            while 1:
                    try:
                            # It will hang here, even if I do close on the socket
                            data = self.clientSocket.recv(1024)
                            print "Got data: ", data
                            self.clientSocket.send(data)
                    except:
                            break

            self.clientSocket.close()

HOST = ''
PORT = 6000
serverSocket = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
serverSocket.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1)
serverSocket.bind((HOST, PORT))
serverSocket.listen(1)

clientSocket, addr = serverSocket.accept()
print 'Got a new connection from: ', addr
clientThread = ClientThread(clientSocket)
clientThread.start()

time.sleep(1)

# This won't make the recv in the clientThread to stop immediately,
# nor will it generate an exception
clientSocket.close()