| Extracted from Pike v7.8 release 866 at 2018-02-09.

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# Method _disable_threads()

Method _disable_threads

  `_disable_threads _disable_threads()`

Description

  This function first posts a notice to all threads that it is time to stop. It then waits until all threads actually *have* stopped, and then then returns a lock object. All other threads will be blocked from running until that object has been freed/destroyed.

  It's mainly useful to do things that require a temporary uid/gid change, since on many OS the effective user and group applies to all threads.

Note

  You should make sure that the returned object is freed even if some kind of error is thrown. That means in practice that it should only have references (direct or indirect) from function local variables. Also, it shouldn't be referenced from cyclic memory structures, since those are only destructed by the periodic gc. (This advice applies to mutex locks in general, for that matter.)