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

Handle SIGPIPE Locally

It's usually best to handle the error locally rather than in a global signal event handler since locally you will have more context as to what's going on and what recourse to take.

I have a communication layer in one of my apps that allows my app to communicate with an external accessory. When a write error occurs I throw and exception in the communication layer and let it bubble up to a try catch block to handle it there.

Code:

The code to ignore a SIGPIPE signal so that you can handle it locally is:

// We expect write failures to occur but we want to handle them where 
// the error occurs rather than in a SIGPIPE handler.
signal(SIGPIPE, SIG_IGN);

This code will prevent the SIGPIPE signal from being raised, but you will get a read / write error when trying to use the socket, so you will need to check for that.