### Thread Handles

The pthread package provides thread handles to identify threads; these are returned as the thread argument to pthread_create( ). Applications supply thread handles as thread identifiers to the routines pthread_join( ), pthread_detach( ), and pthread_cancel( ). Thread handles should be treated as opaque data; they may be compared by calling pthread_equal( ), but any other operations on thread handles are likely to be nonportable and are thus discouraged.

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