Make server stop accepting connections for some condition

Question

I have a server accepting connections from clients. We don't know in advance how many clients to accept so the server just keeps accepting connections in an infinite loop:
for( int i = 0; ; ++i)
  server.accept();What needs to happen is some condition has occurred and the server should stop accepting connections. i.e.
for( int i = 0; stop_accepting_connections == false; ++i)
  server.accept();
System.out.println( "No longer accepting connection.");Essentially some external event (actually the first accepted client thread) will set stop_accepting_connections to true and break the loop.
Problem is even when I break out of the loop clients are still accepted. I'm thinking this is caused by server.accept() being a blocking call and even though we've jumped out of the loop the last server.accept() call is still blocking and listening for a single client. I've tried 2 clients connecting when we've broken out of the loop and only the 1st one is accepted, the second just waits.
1. Is there any way to really stop listening when the condition is set (i.e. how to kill the last blocking accept())? I don't want 1 last trailing client.
2. For the rejected clients, how do I stop it from just waiting i.e. print some error msg and let it end?

Answer 1

Problem is even when I break out of the loop clients are still accepted. I'm thinking this is caused by server.accept() being a blocking call and even though we've jumped out of the loop the last server.accept() call is still blocking and listening for a single client.No, it's caused by the TCP 'backlog' queue, which pre-accepts connections even before you call accept().
1. Is there any way to really stop listening when the condition is set (i.e. how to kill the last blocking accept())?Close the ServerSocket. The thread blocked in accept() will get a SocketException: socket closed, which you should trap and proceed acordingly on. At this point you probably just want to exit the accept() thread.
2. For the rejected clients, how do I stop it from just waiting i.e. print some error msg and let it end?See above. Any clients which are in the backlog queue will get some kind of SocketException or IOException, probably 'connection reset'.