I have some code that spawns a pthread that attempts to maintain a socket connection to a remote host. If the connection is ever lost, it attempts to reconnect using a blocking connect() call on its socket. Since the code runs in a separate thread, I don't really care about the fact that it uses the synchronous socket API.

That is, until it comes time for my application to exit. I would like to perform some semblance of an orderly shutdown, so I use thread synchronization primitives to wake up the thread and signal for it to exit, then perform a pthread_join() on the thread to wait for it to complete. This works great, unless the thread is in the middle of a connect() call when I command the shutdown. In that case, I have to wait for the connect to time out, which could be a long time. This makes the application appear to take a long time to shut down.

What I would like to do is to interrupt the call to connect() in some way. After the call returns, the thread will notice my exit signal and shut down cleanly. Since connect() is a system call, I thought that I might be able to intentionally interrupt it using a signal (thus making the call return EINTR), but I'm not sure if this is a robust method in a POSIX threads environment.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to do this, either using signals or via some other method? As a note, the connect() call is down in some library code that I cannot modify, so changing to a non-blocking socket is not an option.