Shutting down a thread

Question

I'm just wondering... I've been working on a project for some time now, but it has become rather important now that I be able to shutdown the program rather quickly when desired. The problem, however, is that my main class is a thread that runs on a loop similar to...
ServerSocket server = New ServerSocket(5000);
while (shouldRun==true) {
Socket connection=server.acceptAnd so when I enter a shutdown command (in a different thread):
shouldRun=false;
mainThread.interrupt();However, it seems to me that interrupting the thread doesn't occur immediately, and in fact in many cases, the program will not shut down until I initiate another connection - at which point it closes immediately. I'm just wondering if there's a way to immediately close down a thread or program, as I know Thread.stop(); is deprecated.
Ultimately, however, if I am forced to go this road, it wouldn't be the end of the world if the thread didn't close down nicely, but rather abruptly ended (as if I killed the process in Unix manually, which is what I've been doing). I do, after all, save all my information before initiating shutdown procedures... Of course, it would be good if it shutdown nicely, if at all possible, but either way is acceptable so long as it shuts down.
Any suggestions?
(If, for example, there was a way to test if a connection had been requested without locking the thread UNTIL one was requested, that would solve the problem entirely, as I could run my main thread on a loop every two seconds, for example, test if there was a connection, and quit if a shutdown was requested. - I don't know if there is a way to do that, however. Or perhaps if a new connection could notify a sleeping thread without devoting a thread to solely listening for connections? then I could wake the thread up when I wanted to shutdown. That seems even less likely, however...)
Let me know if any more explanation is needed, I've tried to be as clear as possible.
In any case, Thanks in advance,
-Jess

Answer 1

Hmm... I could have sworn that was the first thing I tried... perhaps I'm halucinating. Oh well, thanks for your help.