Thread-Directed Signals

The UNIX signal mechanism is extended with the idea of thread-directed signals. Thread-directed signals are just like ordinary asynchronous signals, except that thread-directed signals are sent to a particular thread instead of to a process.

A separate thread that waits for asynchronous signals can be safer and easier than installing a signal handler that processes the signals.

A better way to deal with asynchronous signals is to treat these signals synchronously. By calling sigwait(2), a thread can wait until a signal occurs. See Waiting for a Specified Signal.

Example 5–2 Asynchronous Signals and sigwait(2)

main() {
    sigset_t set;
    void runA(void);
    int sig;

    sigemptyset(&set);
    sigaddset(&set, SIGINT);
    pthread_sigmask(SIG_BLOCK, &set, NULL);
    pthread_create(NULL, 0, runA, NULL, PTHREAD_DETACHED, NULL);

    while (1) {
        sigwait(&set, &sig);
        printf("nestcount = %d\n", nestcount);
        printf("received signal %d\n", sig);
    }
}

void runA() {
    A(4,4);
    exit(0);
}

This example modifies the code of Example 5–1. The main routine masks the SIGINT signal, creates a child thread that calls function A of the previous example, and issues sigwait() to handle the SIGINT signal.

Note that the signal is masked in the compute thread because the compute thread inherits its signal mask from the main thread. The main thread is protected from SIGINT while, and only while, the thread is not blocked inside of sigwait().

Also, note that no danger exists of having system calls interrupted when you use sigwait().