[SOLVED] How do you declare a recursive mutex with POSIX threads?

How do you declare a recursive mutex with POSIX threads?

I am a bit confused on how to declare a recursive mutex using pthread. What I try to do is have only one thread at a time be able to run a piece of code(including functions) but after scepticism I figured out that the use of mutexes would not work and that instead I should use recursive mutexes. Here is my code:

pthread_mutex_lock(&mutex);                   // LOCK

item = queue_peek(queue);                     // get last item in queue
item_buff=item;                               // save item to a buffer
queue_removelast(queue);                      // remove last item from queue

pthread_mutex_unlock(&mutex);                 // UNLOCK

So what I try to do is just read/remove from the queue serially.

The thing is that there isn't any example out there on how to declare recursive mutexes. Or there maybe a few but they don't compile for me.

Solution

The code from Michael Foukarakis is almost good but he initializes the mutex twice which leads to undefined behavior. It should just be:

pthread_mutex_t Mutex;
pthread_mutexattr_t Attr;

pthread_mutexattr_init(&Attr);
pthread_mutexattr_settype(&Attr, PTHREAD_MUTEX_RECURSIVE);
pthread_mutex_init(&Mutex, &Attr);

I actually use this code in production, and I know it works correctly on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Mac OSX and FreeBSD.

You also need to add proper linker flag to compile this:

AIX, Linux, FreeBSD:
CPLATFORM += -pthread

mingw32:
LDFLAGS += -lpthread