Question

I have thread which sleeps for a long time, then wakes up to do something, then sleep again, like this:

while(some_condition)
{
    // do something
    sleep(1000);
}

How could I make this thread exit gracefully and QUICKLY?

I tried to use pthread_cancel(), but sleeping threads could not be canceled.
I also tried changing the condition of the while loop, but it will still take long to exit.
And I don’t want to use pthread_kill(), since it may kill the thread when it’s working.

So, are there any good ideas?

Answer 1

As an alternative to sleep, you could use pthread_cond_timedwait with a 1000 ms timeout. Then when you want to exit, signal the condition variable.

This is similar to how you might do this in C#/Java using wait and notify.