What you describe (the shutdown technique) is exactly what my linked blogpost describes, by the way. If this is the fault of BSD, or the sockets API definition

What you describe (the shutdown technique) is exactly what my linked blogpost describes, by the way. If this is the fault of BSD, or the sockets API definition is indeed an interesting question. Is RFC 1122 TCP/IP or a BSD document? Anyhow, use the shutdown technique or even better, explicit length or chunked.