I'm just starting to learn how network programming in C works, and I've written a small program that sends messages to and from a UNIX terminal. I'm using pthreads in my program, one of which essentially just waits on recvfrom() to receive a message.

However, I want to be able to close all threads properly if the users chooses to quit the program. The way I have it set up right now, a different thread just cancels the thread waiting on recvfrom, but I'm worried this might not be a good idea since I'm leaving sockets unclosed and I'm not freeing all the memory I allocated.

Is there a way to cancel a recvfrom() call, or some way to run a certain routine upon cancelling a pthread?

Thanks.