Question

I’m trying to implement some basic threading in my script and I need to check whether the thread already exist or not, I’ve found how to set names but cannot figure out how to use is_alive function by name

class History(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)

    def run(self):
        #do some stuff

for i in range(10):
    t = History
    t.setName("name%s"%i))
    t().start()

how can I check later is thread name5 is alive or not?

Answer 1

The is_alive method does not take any arguments. You don’t use is_alive by name. Instead, just call t.is_alive()
to check if the thread t is alive.

class History(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self,*args,**kwargs):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self,*args,**kwargs)

    def run(self):
        #do some stuff
    
threads=[History(name="name%s"%i) for i in range(10)]
for t in threads:
    t.start()

while threads[5].is_alive():
    ...

PS. The docs say the name attribute,

… is a string used for identification purposes only. It has no
semantics. Multiple threads may be given the same name.

so don’t rely on the name as a definitive means of identification.