Detecting TCP Client Disconnect

In TCP there is only one way to detect an orderly disconnect, and that is by getting zero as a return value from read()/recv()/recvXXX() when reading.

There is also only one reliable way to detect a broken connection: by writing to it. After enough writes to a broken connection, TCP will have done enough retries and timeouts to know that it's broken and will eventually cause write()/send()/sendXXX() to return -1 with an errno/WSAGetLastError() value of ECONNRESET, or in some cases 'connection timed out'. Note that the latter is different from 'connect timeout', which can occur in the connect phase.

You should also set a reasonable read timeout, and drop connections that fail it.

The answer here about ioctl() and FIONREAD is compete nonsense. All that does is tell you how many bytes are presently in the socket receive buffer, available to be read without blocking. If a client doesn't send you anything for five minutes that doesn't constitute a disconnect, but it does cause FIONREAD to be zero. Not the same thing: not even close.

To expand on this a bit more:

If you are running a server you either need to use TCP_KEEPALIVE to monitor the client connections, or do something similar yourself, or have knowledge about the data/protocol that you are running over the connection.

Basically, if the connection gets killed (i.e. not properly closed) then the server won't notice until it tries to write something to the client, which is what the keepalive achieves for you. Alternatively, if you know the protocol better, you could just disconnect on an inactivity timeout anyway.