The most general solution, for when you are not in full control of the program's signal handling and want to write data to an actual pipe or use write(2) on a socket, is to first mask the signal for the current thread with pthread_sigmask(3), write the data, drain any pending signal with sigtimedwait(2) and a zero timeout, and then finally unmask SIGPIPE. This technique is described in more detail here. Note that some systems such as OpenBSD do not have sigtimedwait(2) in which case you need to use sigpending(2) to check for pending signals and then call the blocking sigwait(2).