How to stop a running process

Question

If I have a class
class MyTest{
public void start(){
int count=0;
while(true)
System.out.println(count);
++ count;
class TestRun{
public static void main(String[] args)
MyTest test = new MyTest();
test.start();
My question is is there a programatic way to stop MyTest counting in TestRun ? except of course by assigning it a null value;

Answer 1

First of all what you have is not a process -- it's a thread. Separate processes each have their own memory, but threads share the memory with the other threads in the process.
Second, I don't see any reference that you could set to null to stop the thread. Were you thinking of setting your local reference to the thread to null? That will only set that particular reference to null, and will not affect the thread.
You could call stop() on the thread to stop it, but doing so is unsafe.
The best solution is for the thread to continually check some flag to determine if it should keep running. The loop should continue only while that flag is true.