Question

I want the current thread to sleep for a given time. However, another thread should be able to interrupt it and wake it up early. In unix this is fairly simple using sleep + pthread_kill. In windows there is SleepEx and SleepConditionVariableCS. SleepEx doesnt seem to actually cause the thread to sleep since it is still processing events, so would sleeping on a condition variable be a better solution? Furthermore, it is somewhat unclear to me how to wake a thread sleeping with SleepEx. What is correct solution to this problem, SleepEx or SleepConditionVariableCS? (Also, could you point out how to wake a thread sleeping with SleepEx? The MSDN documentation is very confusing.

Answer 1

Create a manual reset event and wait on it with WaitForSingleObject – has a timeout parameter. See MSDN for details.