[c#] How to abort a Task like aborting a Thread (Thread.Abort method)?

We could abort a Thread like this:

Thread thread = new Thread(SomeMethod);
.
.
.
thread.Abort();

But can I abort a Task (in .Net 4.0) in the same way not by cancellation mechanism. I want to kill the Task immediately.

But can I abort a Task (in .Net 4.0) in the same way not by cancellation mechanism. I want to kill the Task immediately.

Other answerers have told you not to do it. But yes, you can do it. You can supply Thread.Abort() as the delegate to be called by the Task's cancellation mechanism. Here is how you could configure this:

class HardAborter
{
  public bool WasAborted { get; private set; }
  private CancellationTokenSource Canceller { get; set; }
  private Task<object> Worker { get; set; }

  public void Start(Func<object> DoFunc)
  {
    WasAborted = false;

    // start a task with a means to do a hard abort (unsafe!)
    Canceller = new CancellationTokenSource();

    Worker = Task.Factory.StartNew(() => 
      {
        try
        {
          // specify this thread's Abort() as the cancel delegate
          using (Canceller.Token.Register(Thread.CurrentThread.Abort))
          {
            return DoFunc();
          }
        }
        catch (ThreadAbortException)
        {
          WasAborted = true;
          return false;
        }
      }, Canceller.Token);
  }

  public void Abort()
  {
    Canceller.Cancel();
  }

}

disclaimer: don't do this.

Here is an example of what not to do:

 var doNotDoThis = new HardAborter();

 // start a thread writing to the console
 doNotDoThis.Start(() =>
    {
       while (true)
       {
          Thread.Sleep(100);
          Console.Write(".");
       }
       return null;
    });


 // wait a second to see some output and show the WasAborted value as false
 Thread.Sleep(1000);
 Console.WriteLine("WasAborted: " + doNotDoThis.WasAborted);

 // wait another second, abort, and print the time
 Thread.Sleep(1000);
 doNotDoThis.Abort();
 Console.WriteLine("Abort triggered at " + DateTime.Now);

 // wait until the abort finishes and print the time
 while (!doNotDoThis.WasAborted) { Thread.CurrentThread.Join(0); }
 Console.WriteLine("WasAborted: " + doNotDoThis.WasAborted + " at " + DateTime.Now);

 Console.ReadKey();

If you have Task constructor, then we may extract Thread from the Task, and invoke thread.abort.

Thread th = null;

Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
{
    th = Thread.CurrentThread;

    while (true)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(DateTime.UtcNow);
    }
});

Thread.Sleep(2000);
th.Abort();
Console.ReadKey();

You can "abort" a task by running it on a thread you control and aborting that thread. This causes the task to complete in a faulted state with a ThreadAbortException. You can control thread creation with a custom task scheduler, as described in this answer. Note that the caveat about aborting a thread applies.

(If you don't ensure the task is created on its own thread, aborting it would abort either a thread-pool thread or the thread initiating the task, neither of which you typically want to do.)

Everyone knows (hopefully) its bad to terminate thread. The problem is when you don't own a piece of code you're calling. If this code is running in some do/while infinite loop , itself calling some native functions, etc. you're basically stuck. When this happens in your own code termination, stop or Dispose call, it's kinda ok to start shooting the bad guys (so you don't become a bad guy yourself).

So, for what it's worth, I've written those two blocking functions that use their own native thread, not a thread from the pool or some thread created by the CLR. They will stop the thread if a timeout occurs:

// returns true if the call went to completion successfully, false otherwise
public static bool RunWithAbort(this Action action, int milliseconds) => RunWithAbort(action, new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, milliseconds));
public static bool RunWithAbort(this Action action, TimeSpan delay)
{
    if (action == null)
        throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(action));

    var source = new CancellationTokenSource(delay);
    var success = false;
    var handle = IntPtr.Zero;
    var fn = new Action(() =>
    {
        using (source.Token.Register(() => TerminateThread(handle, 0)))
        {
            action();
            success = true;
        }
    });

    handle = CreateThread(IntPtr.Zero, IntPtr.Zero, fn, IntPtr.Zero, 0, out var id);
    WaitForSingleObject(handle, 100 + (int)delay.TotalMilliseconds);
    CloseHandle(handle);
    return success;
}

// returns what's the function should return if the call went to completion successfully, default(T) otherwise
public static T RunWithAbort<T>(this Func<T> func, int milliseconds) => RunWithAbort(func, new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, milliseconds));
public static T RunWithAbort<T>(this Func<T> func, TimeSpan delay)
{
    if (func == null)
        throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(func));

    var source = new CancellationTokenSource(delay);
    var item = default(T);
    var handle = IntPtr.Zero;
    var fn = new Action(() =>
    {
        using (source.Token.Register(() => TerminateThread(handle, 0)))
        {
            item = func();
        }
    });

    handle = CreateThread(IntPtr.Zero, IntPtr.Zero, fn, IntPtr.Zero, 0, out var id);
    WaitForSingleObject(handle, 100 + (int)delay.TotalMilliseconds);
    CloseHandle(handle);
    return item;
}

[DllImport("kernel32")]
private static extern bool TerminateThread(IntPtr hThread, int dwExitCode);

[DllImport("kernel32")]
private static extern IntPtr CreateThread(IntPtr lpThreadAttributes, IntPtr dwStackSize, Delegate lpStartAddress, IntPtr lpParameter, int dwCreationFlags, out int lpThreadId);

[DllImport("kernel32")]
private static extern bool CloseHandle(IntPtr hObject);

[DllImport("kernel32")]
private static extern int WaitForSingleObject(IntPtr hHandle, int dwMilliseconds);

While it's possible to abort a thread, in practice it's almost always a very bad idea to do so. Aborthing a thread means the thread is not given a chance to clean up after itself, leaving resources undeleted, and things in unknown states.

In practice, if you abort a thread, you should only do so in conjunction with killing the process. Sadly, all too many people think ThreadAbort is a viable way of stopping something and continuing on, it's not.

Since Tasks run as threads, you can call ThreadAbort on them, but as with generic threads you almost never want to do this, except as a last resort.

using System;
using System.Threading;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

...

var cts = new CancellationTokenSource();
var task = Task.Run(() => { while (true) { } });
Parallel.Invoke(() =>
{
    task.Wait(cts.Token);
}, () =>
{
    Thread.Sleep(1000);
    cts.Cancel();
});

This is a simple snippet to abort a never-ending task with CancellationTokenSource.

The guidance on not using a thread abort is controversial. I think there is still a place for it but in exceptional circumstance. However you should always attempt to design around it and see it as a last resort.

Example;

You have a simple windows form application that connects to a blocking synchronous web service. Within which it executes a function on the web service within a Parallel loop.

CancellationTokenSource cts = new CancellationTokenSource();
ParallelOptions po = new ParallelOptions();
po.CancellationToken = cts.Token;
po.MaxDegreeOfParallelism = System.Environment.ProcessorCount;

Parallel.ForEach(iListOfItems, po, (item, loopState) =>
{

    Thread.Sleep(120000); // pretend web service call

});

Say in this example, the blocking call takes 2 mins to complete. Now I set my MaxDegreeOfParallelism to say ProcessorCount. iListOfItems has 1000 items within it to process.

The user clicks the process button and the loop commences, we have 'up-to' 20 threads executing against 1000 items in the iListOfItems collection. Each iteration executes on its own thread. Each thread will utilise a foreground thread when created by Parallel.ForEach. This means regardless of the main application shutdown, the app domain will be kept alive until all threads have finished.

However the user needs to close the application for some reason, say they close the form. These 20 threads will continue to execute until all 1000 items are processed. This is not ideal in this scenario, as the application will not exit as the user expects and will continue to run behind the scenes, as can be seen by taking a look in task manger.

Say the user tries to rebuild the app again (VS 2010), it reports the exe is locked, then they would have to go into task manager to kill it or just wait until all 1000 items are processed.

I would not blame you for saying, but of course! I should be cancelling these threads using the CancellationTokenSource object and calling Cancel ... but there are some problems with this as of .net 4.0. Firstly this is still never going to result in a thread abort which would offer up an abort exception followed by thread termination, so the app domain will instead need to wait for the threads to finish normally, and this means waiting for the last blocking call, which would be the very last running iteration (thread) that ultimately gets to call po.CancellationToken.ThrowIfCancellationRequested. In the example this would mean the app domain could still stay alive for up to 2 mins, even though the form has been closed and cancel called.

Note that Calling Cancel on CancellationTokenSource does not throw an exception on the processing thread(s), which would indeed act to interrupt the blocking call similar to a thread abort and stop the execution. An exception is cached ready for when all the other threads (concurrent iterations) eventually finish and return, the exception is thrown in the initiating thread (where the loop is declared).

I chose not to use the Cancel option on a CancellationTokenSource object. This is wasteful and arguably violates the well known anti-patten of controlling the flow of the code by Exceptions.

Instead, it is arguably 'better' to implement a simple thread safe property i.e. Bool stopExecuting. Then within the loop, check the value of stopExecuting and if the value is set to true by the external influence, we can take an alternate path to close down gracefully. Since we should not call cancel, this precludes checking CancellationTokenSource.IsCancellationRequested which would otherwise be another option.

Something like the following if condition would be appropriate within the loop;

if (loopState.ShouldExitCurrentIteration || loopState.IsExceptional || stopExecuting) {loopState.Stop(); return;}

The iteration will now exit in a 'controlled' manner as well as terminating further iterations, but as I said, this does little for our issue of having to wait on the long running and blocking call(s) that are made within each iteration (parallel loop thread), since these have to complete before each thread can get to the option of checking if it should stop.

In summary, as the user closes the form, the 20 threads will be signaled to stop via stopExecuting, but they will only stop when they have finished executing their long running function call.

We can't do anything about the fact that the application domain will always stay alive and only be released when all foreground threads have completed. And this means there will be a delay associated with waiting for any blocking calls made within the loop to complete.

Only a true thread abort can interrupt the blocking call, and you must mitigate leaving the system in a unstable/undefined state the best you can in the aborted thread's exception handler which goes without question. Whether that's appropriate is a matter for the programmer to decide, based on what resource handles they chose to maintain and how easy it is to close them in a thread's finally block. You could register with a token to terminate on cancel as a semi workaround i.e.

CancellationTokenSource cts = new CancellationTokenSource();
ParallelOptions po = new ParallelOptions();
po.CancellationToken = cts.Token;
po.MaxDegreeOfParallelism = System.Environment.ProcessorCount;

Parallel.ForEach(iListOfItems, po, (item, loopState) =>
{

    using (cts.Token.Register(Thread.CurrentThread.Abort))
    {
        Try
        {
           Thread.Sleep(120000); // pretend web service call          
        }
        Catch(ThreadAbortException ex)
        {
           // log etc.
        }
        Finally
        {
          // clean up here
        }
    }

});

but this will still result in an exception in the declaring thread.

All things considered, interrupt blocking calls using the parallel.loop constructs could have been a method on the options, avoiding the use of more obscure parts of the library. But why there is no option to cancel and avoid throwing an exception in the declaring method strikes me as a possible oversight.