Yeah, I mean a join with a timeout, and it is indeed not too much of a hassle to work around, but it's more the principle of not having an innate timed join in POSIX Threads.

The Open Group published their rationale for not including a timed version of join, stating, "the working group ultimately rejected [adding a timeout to] pthread_join() since both that interface and a timed variant of that interface are non-minimal and may be implemented as a function. See below for a library implementation of pthread_join()."

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/xrat/xsh_chap0...