THREADVALUE Retrieve the return values from a thread

Section: FreeMat Threads

Usage

The threadvalue function retrieves the values returned by the function specified in the threadnew call. The syntax for its use is 
   [arg1,arg2,...,argN] = threadvalue(handle)

where handle is the value returned by a threadnew call. Note that there are issues with nargout. See the examples section of threadnew for details on how to work around this limitation. Because the function you have spawned with threadnew may still be executing, threadvalue must first threadwait for the function to complete before retrieving the output values. This wait may take an arbitrarily long time if the thread function is caught in an infinite loop. Hence, you can also specify a timeout parameter to threadvalue as 

   [arg1,arg2,...,argN] = threadvalue(handle,timeout)

where the timeout is specified in milliseconds. If the wait times out, an error is raised (that can be caught with a try and catch block. In either case, if the thread function itself caused an error and ceased execution abruptly, then calling threadvalue will cause that function to raise an error, allowing you to retrieve the error that was caused and correct it. See the examples section for more information.

Example

Here we do something very simple. We want to obtain a listing of all files on the system, but do not want the results to stop our computation. So we run the system call in a thread. 
--> a = threadnew;                         % Create the thread
--> threadstart(a,'system',1,'ls -lrt /'); % Start the thread
--> b = rand(100)\rand(100,1);             % Solve some equations simultaneously
--> c = threadvalue(a);                    % Retrieve the file list
--> size(c)                                % It is large!

ans = 
  1 20 

--> threadfree(a);

In this example, we force the threaded function to cause an exception (by calling the error function as the thread function). When we call threadvalue, we get an error, instead of the return value of the function 

--> a = threadnew

a = 
 3 

--> threadstart(a,'error',0,'Hello world!'); % Will immediately stop due to error
--> c = threadvalue(a)                     % The error comes to us
Error: Thread: Hello world!
--> threadfree(a)

Note that the error has the text Thread: prepended to the message to help you identify that this was an error in a different thread.