catching SIGINT in a multithreaded program

Question

I am writing a multithreaded program where I want to handle a possible Ctrl-C command from the user to terminate execution. As far as I know there is no guarantee that the main thread, which is able to cancel every working thread, will catch the signal. Is it, therefore, necessary to have a different signal handler to the code of the working thread so that anyone will catch the signal if it arrives, or is there another way to do that with having a signal handler only in the main thread's code?

Answer 1

You can block signals from the calling thread with pthread_sigmask().

And, as the blocked signals are inherited to newly created threads, you can block SIGINT in the main thread, then launch your other threads, and then unblock it in the main thread, if that is preferable.