Question

Is there a way to kill a child thread after some specified time limit in Java?
Edit: Also this particular thread may be blocked in its worst case (Thread is used to wait for a file modification and blocks until this event occurs), so im not sure that interrupt() will be successful?

Answer 1

Make use of ExecutorService to execute the Callable, checkout the methods wherein you can specify the timeout. E.g.

ExecutorService executor = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor();
executor.invokeAll(Arrays.asList(new Task()), 10, TimeUnit.MINUTES); // Timeout of 10 minutes.
executor.shutdown();

Here Task of course implements Callable.