Question on media recovery

I thought I had a good understanding of how media recovery works, but after some reading and discussion here in the last few days it turns out it's not so good. I'd like to know when media recovery knows when to stop applying logs and signal that recovery is complete. When you are recovering using an existing control file, my understanding is that the stop SCN for each datafile is obtained from the control file, but what if you are recovering using a backup control file, or one which has been recreated from a trace file ? The Oracle Backup and Recovery Handbook says:

"A backup control file wouldn't have valid information about the online log files and the data file stop SCNs. Therefore, Oracle can't use the online log file during recovery, and hence assumes infinte stop SCNs for the data files"

Does this mean that Oracle will just apply all the logs available in the archive log directory until you cancel the recovery, or is there some other method for it to know when recovery is complete ?

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