Do I have absolutely call "WaitForSingleObject" before "TerminateThread" ?

When should i call "WaitForSingleObject" before ending a thread?

thank you all


EDIT by DOS386: Moved from Main to Windows

Actually you don't have to call TerminateThread always. If the thread ends normally, there is no reason to call TerminateThread.
You should use WaitForSingleObject only when you have to wait for thread to finish it's job. For example, if the main thread can't continue without the result of the thread. If you wait always it is useless to use thread - you can do the job in the main thread, instead of waiting.

Only if you are not synchronising something. It could be that the main thread finishes a parallel task before another thread and needs to wait. Perfectly normal and acceptable behaviour.

Here is a sentence that perfectly explains the usefulness of this function.
perfect, I understood. Thank you very much JohnFound

Quote:

Only if you are not synchronising something. It could be that the main thread finishes a parallel task before another thread and needs to wait. Perfectly normal and acceptable behaviour.

I also understand that. thank you revolution.
(there is no synchronization in my case)

when you create thread, you must take responsibility for it, by for example registering waitforsingleobject. Thread that created child thread must be notyfied when it exitted (was killed?). You shouldnt just spawn thread and forget about it, hoping it will complete a job. When you write multithreaded app, 1 thread is always main thread wich only watch over its children and manage them,

Actually, "TerminateThread" function is rather bad for using, cause it can lead to leaks (read Jeffrey Richter ).