I'm attempting to do some socket programming in C.
To get my feet wet, I want to create a simple command-line program that will allow two people to chat back and forth. However, I do not know of a way to allow the user to enter and send data as the program listens for incoming connections.

Is there any way to do this? (I assume that there is, otherwise gaim and licq would not run as one process, but rather as a server and a client)

Am I asking a stupid question due to sleep deprivation? Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

woodstock

Using select() and your own input routines you could manage this in a single thread/process, but it would probably be easiest to have separate sending/receiving threads/processes.

You can either use POSIX Threads or select. DO NOT USE POSIX THREADS. That leaves select. Threads introduce a lot of syncronization bugs (like the one I am wrestling with in my "Music Player" where the UI thread checks to see if the mutex is locked too soon...)

Those "synchronization bugs" are not inherent in the API or implementation. They come from your apparently insufficient level of knowledge about concurrent programming. A similar lack of knowledge would be the only reason to flat out remove pthreads from the realm of possibility.

I know. But, if he is having trouble with sockets, adding threads to the mix can only make it much, much worse. (I also appear to have fixed my threading bug...I just had to lock the mutex in the main thread before starting the new thread).

Thanks for your advice, guys.


It's not that I'm necessarily having trouble with sockets, it's just that I did not know if there was a way to listen for a connection/receive data while allowing the user to input/send data.

Not trying to take a shortcut really, I just doni't want to sift through a load of UI code of something like Licq, etc. to find the meaty socket part :)

Thanks again.