Another socket/thread question

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Cliff Wells <logiplexsoftware at earthlink.net>:
| On Wed, 13 Mar 2002 10:37:29 -0800
| Ken wrote:

|> I've got a thread that continously listens to a socket, and reports what it
|> receives. Blocking is turned on, and I would like it to stay that way since
|> the only thing the thread has to do, is listen to the socket.
|> 
|> My question is when the socket needs to be closed (program shuts down, or
|> that user is being disconnected by the server) is it possible to interupt a
|> socket.recv ()?
|> 
|> If not, whats the easiest way to cut processor time from looping endlessly
|> with blocking turned off?
|
| You might try using select() with a reasonable timeout period.  Then you
| won't busy loop, but you'll be able to check every few seconds to see if
| some condition is set that would indicate a program exit.
|
| Alternatively, you could have your shutdown function send something to the
| socket itself which would indicate to the thread that it should exit.  Or
| even some irrelevant data followed by a test on whether the thread should
| exit (the data would never be processed so what it is would be unimportant
| - it's used simply to cause socket.recv to return).

Or a new socket or pipe could be assigned for this purpose, since the
beauty of select is that it can monitor multiple descriptors.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu