Question

I’m looking to call a python function from within another python script in a new thread.
I have experience using subprocess.Popen, but I used that for calling .exe’s in the command line. Anyone recommend how to do this or a module to use?

def main(argv):
    call otherdef(1,2,3) in a new thread
    sleep for 10 minutes
    kill the otherdef process

def otherdef(num1, num2, num3):
    while(True):
        print num1

Answer 1

Here is a solution, but its not exactly like you asked, because its complicated to kill a thread. Its better to let the thread terminate itself, all threads default to daemonic=False (unless its parent thread is daemonic), so when the main thread dies, your thread would live. Set it to true, and it will die with your main thread.

Basically all you do is launch a Thread and give it a method to run. You needed to be able to pass arguments so as you can see I pass an args= parameter with the values to pass to the target method.

import time
import threading


def otherdef(num1, num2, num3):
    #Inside of otherdef we use an event to loop on, 
    #we do this so we can have a convent way to stop the process.

    stopped = threading.Event()
    #set a timer, after 10 seconds.. kill this loop
    threading.Timer(10, stopped.set).start()
    #while the event has not been triggered, do something useless
    while(not stopped.is_set()):
        print 'doing ', num1, num2, num3
        stopped.wait(1)

    print 'otherdef exiting'

print 'Running'
#create a thread, when I call start call the target and pass args
p = threading.Thread(target=otherdef, args=(1,2,3))
p.start()
#wait for the threadto finish
p.join(11)

print 'Done'    

---

Its still unclear if you want a process or a thread, but if you want a Process import multiprocessing and switch threading.Thread( to multiprocessing.Process(, everything else stays the same.