How to Interrupt an Unblocked Thread

Question

Consider the following code:
public class MyThread extends Thread {
  public void run() {
    //long operation, might NOT be a blocking one, say
   long lineno = 1;
   System.out.println(" Line Number: " + lineno++);
   System.out.println(" Line Number: " + lineno++);
   System.out.println(" Line Number: " + lineno++);
    :   //say some 1000+ such LOC is there. i.e there's no loop/blocking etc
   System.out.println(" Line Number: " + lineno++);
in some other class
MyThread obj = new MyThread();
obj.start();..at some later point, I want to terminate the (long time consuming) operation which is being perfomred by thread (obj) ...
will the following code work?
obj = null;What exactly the above code will do to the thread (obj)?
I know there's one method
obj.interrupt();but AFA my understanding with this method is that it works best if we have some kind of loops in our run method,
so that we can periodically check the status whether thread is being interrupted or not, or something similer.
So how can we interrupt/terminate such thread??

Answer 1

You cannot safely, forcibly stop a running thread.For code in original post (by vijaywadnere) .stop() should work
yes it's deprecated and bad idea in general, but it will do
consider example
public static void main(String[] args) {
          final Thread obj = new Thread() {
                 public void run() {
                   //long operation, might NOT be a blocking one, say
                  long lineno = 1;
                  while(true){                                   
                  System.out.print(" . " + lineno++);                 
          Thread stopper = new Thread(obj) {
                 public void run() {
                      try {
                         sleep(100);
                         obj.interrupt();
                         System.out.println("\ninterrupt");
                         sleep(100);
                         obj.stop();
                         System.out.println("\nstop");
                    } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                         // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                         e.printStackTrace();
          System.out.println(" obj");
          obj.start();
          System.out.println(" stopper");
          stopper.start();
}