TerminateThread is a bad idea, especially if your thread uses synchronization objects such as mutexes. It can lead to unreleased memory and handles, and to deadlocks, so you re correct that you need to do something else.

Typically, the way that a thread terminates is to return from the function that defines the thread. The main thread signals the worker thread to exit using an event object or a even a simple boolean if it s checked often enough. If the worker thread waits with WaitForSingleObject, you may need to change it to a WaitForMultipleObjects, where one of the objects is an event. The main thread would call SetEvent and the worker thread would wake up and return.

We really can t provide any useful code unless you show us what you re doing. Depending on what the worker thread is doing and how your main thread is communicating information to it, it could look very different.

Also, under [now very old] MSVC, you need to use _beginthreadex instead of CreateThread in order to avoid memory leaks in the CRT. See MSKB #104641.

Update:

One use of worker thread is as a "timer", to do some operation on regular intervals. At the most trivial:

for (;;) {
    switch (WaitForSingleObject(kill_event, timeout)) {
        case WAIT_TIMEOUT: /*do timer action*/ break;
        default: return 0; /* exit the thread */
    }
}

Another use is to do something on-demand. Basically the same, but with the timeout set to INFINITE and doing some action on WAIT_OBJECT_0 instead of WAIT_TIMEOUT. In this case you would need two events, one to make the thread wake up and do some action, another to make it wake up and quit:

HANDLE handles[2] = { action_handle, quit_handle };
for (;;) {
    switch (WaitForMultipleObject(handles, 2, FALSE, INFINITE)) {
        case WAIT_OBJECT_0 + 0: /* do action */ break;
        default:
        case WAIT_OBJECT_0 + 1: /* quit */ break;
    }
}

Note that it s important that the loop do something reasonable if WFSO/WFMO return an error instead of one of the expected results. In both examples above, we simply treat an error as if we had been signaled to quit.

You could achieve the same result with the first example by closing the event handle from the main thread, causing the worker thread get an error from WaitForSingleObject and quit, but I wouldn t recommend that approach.

Since you don t know what the thread is doing, there is no way to safely terminate the thread from outside.

Why do you think you cannot terminate it from within?

You can create an event prior to starting the thread and pass that event s handle to the thread. You call SetEvent() on that event from the main thread to signal the thread to stop and then WaitForSingleObject on the thread handle to wait for the thread to actually have finished. Within the threads loop, you call WaitForSingleObject() on the event, specifying a timeout of 0 (zero), so that the call returns immediately even if the event is not set. If that call returns WAIT_TIMEOUT, the event is not set, if it returns WAIT_OBJECT_0, it is set. In the latter case you return from the thread function.

I presume your thread isn t just burning CPU cycles in an endless loop, but does some waiting, maybe through calling Sleep(). If so, you can do the sleeping in WaitForSingleObject instead, by passing a timeout to it.

What are you doing in the background thread? If you re looping over something, you can end the thread within itself by having a shared public static object (like a Boolean) that you set to true from the foreground thread and that the background thread checks for and exits cleanly when set to true.

It is a code example for thread management in the fork-join manner. It use struct Thread as a thread descriptor.

Let s introduce some abstraction of the thread descriptor data structure:

    #include <Windows.h>

    struct Thread
    {
        volatile BOOL stop;

        HANDLE event;
        HANDLE thread;
    };

    typedef DWORD ( __stdcall *START_ROUTINE)(struct Thread* self, LPVOID lpThreadParameter);

    struct BootstrapArg
    {
        LPVOID arg;
        START_ROUTINE body;
        struct Thread* self;
    };

Functions for the thread parent use:

• StartThread() initialize this structure and launches new thread.

• StopThread() initiate thread termination and wait until thread will be actually terminated.

  DWORD __stdcall ThreadBootstrap(LPVOID lpThreadParameter)
  {
      struct BootstrapArg ba = *(struct BootstrapArg*)lpThreadParameter;
  
      free(lpThreadParameter);
  
      return ba.body(ba.self, ba.arg);
  }
  
  VOID StartThread(struct Thread* CONST thread, START_ROUTINE body, LPVOID arg)
  {
      thread->event = CreateEvent(NULL, TRUE, FALSE, NULL);
      thread->stop = FALSE;
      thread->thread = NULL;
  
      if ((thread->event != NULL) && (thread->event != INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE))
      {
          struct BootstrapArg* ba = (struct BootstrapArg*)malloc(sizeof(struct BootstrapArg));
  
          ba->arg = arg;
          ba->body = body;
          ba->self = thread;
  
          thread->thread = CreateThread(NULL, 0, ThreadBootstrap, ba, 0, NULL);
          if ((thread->thread == NULL) || (thread->thread == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE))
          {
              free(ba);
          }
      }
  }
  
  DWORD StopThread(struct Thread* CONST thread)
  {
      DWORD status = ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER;
  
      thread->stop = TRUE;
  
      SetEvent(thread->event);
      WaitForSingleObject(thread->thread, INFINITE);
  
      GetExitCodeThread(thread->thread, &status);
      CloseHandle(thread->event);
      CloseHandle(thread->thread);
  
      thread->event = NULL;
      thread->thread = NULL;
  
      return status;
  }
  

This set of functions is expected to be used from the thread launched by StartThread():

• IsThreadStopped() - Check for the termination request. Must be used after waiting on the below functions to identify the actual reason of the termination of waiting state.
• ThreadSleep() - Replaces use of Sleep() for intra-thread code.
• ThreadWaitForSingleObject() - Replaces use of WaitForSingleObject() for intra-thread code.
• ThreadWaitForMultipleObjects() - Replaces use of WaitForMultipleObjects() for intra-thread code.

First function can be used for light-weight checks for termination request during long-running job processing. (For example big file compression). Rest of the functions handle the case of waiting for some system resources, like events, semaphores etc. (For example worker thread waiting new request arriving from the requests queue).

BOOL IsThreadStopped(struct Thread* CONST thread)
{
    return thread->stop;
}

VOID ThreadSleep(struct Thread* CONST thread, DWORD dwMilliseconds)
{
    WaitForSingleObject(thread->event, dwMilliseconds);
}

DWORD ThreadWaitForSingleObject(struct Thread* CONST thread, HANDLE hHandle, DWORD dwMilliseconds)
{
    HANDLE handles[2] = {hHandle, thread->event};

    return WaitForMultipleObjects(2, handles, FALSE, dwMilliseconds);
}

DWORD ThreadWaitForMultipleObjects(struct Thread* CONST thread, DWORD nCount, CONST HANDLE* lpHandles, DWORD dwMilliseconds)
{
    HANDLE* handles = (HANDLE*)malloc(sizeof(HANDLE) * (nCount + 1U));
    DWORD status;

    memcpy(handles, lpHandles, nCount * sizeof(HANDLE));

    handles[nCount] = thread->event;
    status = WaitForMultipleObjects(2, handles, FALSE, dwMilliseconds);

    free(handles);

    return status;
}