andermoran / basic-ipc-chatting

A very very basic implementation of two users communicating on a local machine using IPC, in particular named pipes.

Basic IPC Chatting

What is this?

This is a very basic implementation of two 'users' communicating with eachother on a local machine via IPC (Inter-process communication).

What's going on?

In this projects named pipes are used for IPC. Pipes are essentially channels that processes can use to communication with one another. One could think of pipes as a mail service. One processes sends mail to a mailbox and another process is able to read the mail from that mailbox. In simplest terms, this is what these two files (user1.c & user2.c) do. Two threads are created send_thread and receive_thread. These threads are then executed two calls of pthread_create. This allows for the two threads to run in parallel so that the program can receive data and send data concurrently.

How do I run this?

This is made to run on Mac OS X and Linux

Compile using gcc

gcc -o user1 user1.c

gcc -o user2 user2.c

The best way to run these two executables is to

• Open a terminal window and run the user1 exectuable

• Open another terminal window and run the user2 executable

• Now start chatting!

Need more info?

Check out this question on stack overflow.