multithreading - Multiple threads in C program

Question

I'm writing a Unix application in C which uses multiple threads of control. I'm having a problem with the main function terminating before the thread it has spawned have a change to finish their work. How do I prevent this from happening. I suspect I need to use the pthread_join primitive, but I'm not sure how. Thanks!

Answer 1

Yes, you could use pthread_join() (see other anwers for how to do that). But let me explain the pthread model and show you another option.

In Unix, a process exits when the primary thread returns from main, when any thread calls exit() or when the last thread calls pthread_exit(). Based on the last option, you can simply have your main thread call pthread_exit() and the process will stay alive as long as at least one more thread is running.