How to prevent SIGPIPEs (or handle them properly)

Question

I have a small server program that accepts connections on a TCP or local UNIX socket, reads a simple command and (depending on the command) sends a reply.

The problem

Answer 1

In this post I described possible solution for Solaris case when neither SO_NOSIGPIPE nor MSG_NOSIGNAL is available.

Instead, we have to temporarily suppress SIGPIPE in the current thread that executes library code. Here's how to do this: to suppress SIGPIPE we first check if it is pending. If it does, this means that it is blocked in this thread, and we have to do nothing. If the library generates additional SIGPIPE, it will be merged with the pending one, and that's a no-op. If SIGPIPE is not pending then we block it in this thread, and also check whether it was already blocked. Then we are free to execute our writes. When we are to restore SIGPIPE to its original state, we do the following: if SIGPIPE was pending originally, we do nothing. Otherwise we check if it is pending now. If it does (which means that out actions have generated one or more SIGPIPEs), then we wait for it in this thread, thus clearing its pending status (to do this we use sigtimedwait() with zero timeout; this is to avoid blocking in a scenario where malicious user sent SIGPIPE manually to a whole process: in this case we will see it pending, but other thread may handle it before we had a change to wait for it). After clearing pending status we unblock SIGPIPE in this thread, but only if it wasn't blocked originally.

Example code at https://github.com/kroki/XProbes/blob/1447f3d93b6dbf273919af15e59f35cca58fcc23/src/libxprobes.c#L156