Here's a sketch of a simple way to use select() to deal with this problem:
// Note: untested code, may contain typos or bugs
static volatile bool _threadGoAway = false;
void MyThread(void *)
{
int fd = (your socket fd);
while(1)
{
struct timeval timeout = {1, 0}; // make select() return once per second
fd_set readSet;
FD_ZERO(&readSet);
FD_SET(fd, &readSet);
if (select(fd+1, &readSet, NULL, NULL, &timeout) >= 0)
{
if (_threadGoAway)
{
printf("MyThread: main thread wants me to scram, bye bye!\n");
return;
}
else if (FD_ISSET(fd, &readSet))
{
char buf[1024];
int numBytes = recvfrom(fd, buf, sizeof(buf), 0);
[...handle the received bytes here...]
}
}
else perror("select");
}
}
// To be called by the main thread at shutdown time
void MakeTheReadThreadGoAway()
{
_threadGoAway = true;
(void) pthread_join(_thread, NULL); // may block for up to one second
}
A more elegant method would be to avoid using the timeout feature of select, and instead create a socket pair (using socketpair()) and have the main thread send a byte on its end of the socket pair when it wants the I/O thread to go away, and have the I/O thread exit when it receives a byte on its socket at the other end of the socketpair. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader though. :)
It's also often a good idea to set the socket to non-blocking mode also, to avoid the (small but non-zero) chance that the recvfrom() call might block even after select() indicated the socket is ready-to-read, as described here. But blocking mode might be "good enough" for your purpose.
