The only reasonable interpretation of ServerSocket.close() I can think of
is to terminate a call to ServerSocket.accept() (in another thread) by throwing
some kind of socket exception. As is pointed out by this poster to
advanced-java, however, the documentation doesn't actually state that this is
the intended behavior. We should fix the documentation.

Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 18:33:21 -0400
To: ###@###.### (Bill Foote), ###@###.###
From: Mark Grand <###@###.###>
Subject: Re: stopping ServerSocket.accept()??
Mime-Version: 1.0

At 03:09 PM 6/12/98 -0700, Bill Foote wrote:
>I realize that the original question was for JDK 1.0.2, but I just wanted
>to point out: In 1.1 and better, you can stop accept()ing sockets by calling
>ServerSocket.close(). There's no need to set SO_TIMEOUT and check
>a status variable.
>
>I just checked, and it works. The thread doing the accept() receives
>this:
>
>java.net.SocketException: Socket closed

Relying on SO_TIMEOUT is to rely on documented features. I am not aware of
any official documentation that guarantees that a SocketException will be
thrown in that case. A different SocketImpl may work differently.
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Java Consultant/Instructor ###@###.###
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