Unblock a Blocked Winsock accept() Call

Question

I am using Winsock under VS 2008.

I have a thread dedicated to accepting incoming TCP connection requests via a blocking call to accept(). When the time comes for my app to shut down, I need to somehow unblock this thread so it can perform its shutdown work and exit. Is there a way I may unblock accept()?

I will post another question in case there is no way to unblock accept(). That question is: If I perform a hard kill of the thread that is blocked on accept(), will anything bad happen (corruption of OS data structures, etc.)?

Thanks, Dave

Answer 1

One way to unblock a blocking accept() is to close the listening socket from another thread. Otherwise, you can put the listening socket into non-blocking mode and use select() (which does support a timeout) to detect when accept() can be called without blocking.