Simple Linux Signal Handling

Question

I have a program that creates many threads and runs until either power is shutdown to the embedded computer, or the user uses kill or ctrlc

Answer 1

First of all - if you don't know, whether you should handle any signals, then you probably don't. Signals require handling in some specific cases, like closing sockets, sending some message to other connected processes before exiting, or handling SIGPIPE signal from write() (and probably many more).

Secondly - this while (!terminate) sleep(2); is not very good - in worst case it might make user (or even system) impatient with having to wait 2s and send to your program a SIGKILL, which you can't handle.

IMHO the best solution here would be using signalfd and select, so you can terminate your program without having to wait 2s.