TerminateThread() returns error when terminating the thread

Question

I have a ThreadA created using the CreateThread function. Inside ThreadA, another thread, ThreadB is created using the CreateThread function.

Now, I want to terminate ThreadB from ThreadA but the TerminateThread function fails.

Is it because ThreadA may not have the right to terminate ThreadB? I am really confused with this situation.

Answer 1

In general, never use TerminateThread because you can leave locks held and cause all sorts of problems. As MSDN says:

What you can do instead is to make your thread wait on an event object, which you can use to signal termination from another thread.

If you need to perform a periodic check for a terminate signal within some normal thread processing, you can set a wait timeout of zero so your thread can do still work while waiting to be terminated.

An example is in this SO answer here.