Why does the socket accept function not release after closesock called?

Question

I have a server application that opens a socket and listen for a connection. In the application, I have a separate thread that creates a socket, binds it and calls the listen and accept functions on it.

When the application closes I call closesocket on the socket that was created, then wait for the socket thread to close. However, if the thread is waiting on the accept function the thread never completes.

I thought that the accept function would return after the cloasesocket was called. Is this a correct thought? If so, why does the accept function not return? Is there another way to cause the accept function to return?

Answer 1

Don't call accept unless select says it's OK. In that case accept will never block.

Answer 2

Check the man page... http://linux.die.net/man/2/accept

accept() blocks on socket A, and when a new connection comes in, returns a new socket B to connect the client. This is frequently in a tight loop with a fork() and exec() to send the new connection off to a child process to handle the connection, while the parent returns into accept() to wait for another connection.

Are you trying to say that another thread in your program closes socket A out from under the accept() call?