I am trying to figure out how to have two pthreads interact with one another...I am using mutex to lock the threads out but, the other threads don't stop where they are. How do you get the other threads to suspend or wait for the the thread thats in the critical section. My problem is that i am reading in data from files and i need them read in a certain order...here is my locking code. //mutex lock pthread_mutex_lock(&mtx); //messageWrite(temp2); message.append(temp2); //mutex unlock pthread_mutex_unlock(&mtx); i know it is locking out the other process but i need them to stop while the thread is in this area...any help pleeease, very frustrating.

Its simple - a POSIX thread calling pthread_mutex_lock() to lock the mutex either gets exclusive access to the code starting from the successful locking until its call to unlock the mutex, or it waits until the mutex is unlocked by the thread that locked it.