Mutex Creation

In order to create a mutex, we use the 'pthread_mutex_init' function.

 ...
 /* somewhere in our code... */

 pthread_mutex_t mutex;  /* will contain a mutex's data */

 /* initialize the mutex - it may not be used before this */
 if (pthread_mutex_init(&mutex, NULL) != 0) {
   perror("pthread_mutex_init");
   exit(1);
 }

If mutex initialization worked (i.e. 'pthread_mutex_init' returned 0) we may now use the mutex safely, until...