It is best to make the condition (monitored by your condition variable) the inverse condition of a while-loop:
while(!some_condition). Inside this loop, you go to sleep if your condition fails, triggering the body of the loop.
This way, if your thread is awoken--possibly spuriously--your loop will still check the condition before proceeding. Think of the condition as the state of interest, and think of the condition variable as more of a signal from the system that this state might be ready. The loop will do the heavy lifting of actually confirming that it's true, and going to sleep if it's not.
I just wrote a template for an async queue, hope this helps. Here, q.empty() is the inverse condition of what we want: for the queue to have something in it. So it serves as the check for the while loop.
#ifndef SAFE_QUEUE
#define SAFE_QUEUE
#include <queue>
#include <mutex>
#include <condition_variable>
// A threadsafe-queue.
template <class T>
class SafeQueue
{
public:
SafeQueue(void)
: q()
, m()
, c()
{}
~SafeQueue(void)
{}
// Add an element to the queue.
void enqueue(T t)
{
std::lock_guard<std::mutex> lock(m);
q.push(t);
c.notify_one();
}
// Get the "front"-element.
// If the queue is empty, wait till a element is avaiable.
T dequeue(void)
{
std::unique_lock<std::mutex> lock(m);
while(q.empty())
{
// release lock as long as the wait and reaquire it afterwards.
c.wait(lock);
}
T val = q.front();
q.pop();
return val;
}
private:
std::queue<T> q;
mutable std::mutex m;
std::condition_variable c;
};
#endif