Question

How can I determine if a Win32 thread has terminated?

The documentation for GetExitCodeThread warns to not to use it for this reason since the error code STILL_ACTIVE can be returned for other reasons.

Thanks for the help! 🙂

Answer 1

MSDN mentions that ‘When a thread terminates, the thread object attains a signaled state, satisfying any threads that were waiting on the object’.

So, you can check for whether a thread has terminated by checking the state of the thread handle – whether it’s signaled or not:

DWORD result = WaitForSingleObject( hThread, 0);  if (result == WAIT_OBJECT_0) {     // the thread handle is signaled - the thread has terminated } else {     // the thread handle is not signaled - the thread is still alive }