From: Logan Capaldo <logancapaldo@...>
Date: 2005-08-29T22:41:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Associating a name with a thread?


On Aug 29, 2005, at 9:19 AM, Andrew S. Townley wrote:

>
> Hi.  Me again.
>
> I'm doing some research/work using threads with ruby.  I saw this  
> in the
> ri docs for Thread#inspect:
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------  
> Thread#inspect
>      thr.inspect   => string
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> --
>      Dump the name, id, and status of _thr_ to a string.
>
> And was wondering how you assign a meaningful name to a thread.  Right
> now, I have about 2X as many threads created as I would've thought
> (using Thread.list.length).  Desk-checking the code doesn't show
> anything obvious, but I have instrumented it to the point that I have
> output with the Thread information, e.g.
>
> #<Thread:0xb7f94e94>: doing something
>
> But, what I want is to be able to do something like
>
> task1 = Thread.new("task1") { ... }
>
> or at least
>
> task1 = Thread.new { ... }
> task1.name = "task1"
>
> to get it to show up during execution.
>
> Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way.  Any pointers in the right
> direction would be appreciated.
>
> Cheers,
>
> ast
>
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>

Well I can't find anything that seems to indicate that threads have  
this functionality, but you have two choices:

1) Subclass thread and add a name method.
2) Add a name method to thread.

either way it would proabably look like:

class Thread # or NamedThread < Thread
            attr_accessor :name
            alias __old__thread__inspect inspect # not neccessary if  
subclassing thread
            def inspect
                  inspection = __old_thread__inspect # or inspection  
= super if subclassing
                 unless @name.nil?
                       inspection.sub(Regexp.new("^#<#{class.name}:)0x 
[a-fA-F0-9]+")) { |match| match + @name}
                  else
                       inspection
                  end
            end
end