How to terminate a socket server gracefully?

[licht]

I have a server using unix domain socket. It works in a standard way: listening for requests and accepting each of them by running a separater thread for it:

while(true){
int clientsocket;


clientsocket=accept(serversocket, NULL, NULL);

ClientHandler * ch = new ClientHandler(someparameters, clientsocket);
ch->start();
}

So, how to terminate this server gracefully? I think some signal handler can be used for this purpose though I haven't done so and it's ok to do "kill -TERM pid" w/o the signal is handled by the server. But since there is a lot of cleanning work to do for each socket connection, this is not something recommended.

Any idea or suggestions? Thanks!

[cyberinstru]

It is always better to trap signals and close the socket. Otherwise, the opened socket would be left unclosed and if your system reaches the max number of open descriptors limit, u wud be able to accept any new connections.