Cancel thread with read() operation on serial port

Question

in my Cocoa project, I communicate with a device connected to a serial port. Now, I am waiting for the serial device to send a particular message of some bytes. For the read operation (and the reaction for once the desired message has been received), I created a new thread. On user request, I want to be able to cancel the thread.

As Apple suggests in the docs, I added a flag to the thread dictionary, periodically check if the flag has been set and if so, call [NSThread exit]. This works fine.

Now, the thread may be stuck waiting for the serial device to finally send the 12 byte message. The read call looks like this:

numBytes = read(fileDescriptor, buffer, 12);

Once the thread starts reading from the device, but no data comes in, I can set the flag to tell the thread to finish, but the thread is not going to read the flag unless it finally received at least 12 bytes of data and continues processing.

Is there a way to kill a thread that currently performs a read operation on a serial device?

Edit for clarification: I do not insist in creating a separate thread for the I/O operations with the serial device. If there is a way to encapsulate the operations such that I am able to "kill" them if the user presses a cancel button, I am perfectly happy. I am developing a Cocoa application for desktop Mac OS X, so no restrictions regarding mobile devices and their capabilities apply. A workaround would be to make the read function return immediately if there are no bytes to read. How can I do this?

Answer 1

Use select or poll with a timeout to detect when the descriptor is ready for reading.

Set the timeout to (say) half a second and call it in a loop while checking to see if your thread should exit.

Asynchronous thread cancellation is almost always a bad idea. Try to stick with event-driven interfaces (and, if necessary, timeouts).