Real-time-chat-application-in-c

Using Socket programming and threading to make a real-time chatroom in c

Note-:

1. The above code is tested for MAC-OS, it should work with linux and windows but is untested.
2. Server and Client script can be on the same local machine or on different machines. If you want to run the scripts on different machine make sure you have the public IP address and appropriate machine-level permissions (remote connections) for the machine where you run the server script.
3. You may run multiple client instances to test the script

Usage server script

./server ## script will run on port 80 by default
./server 90 ## run the script on port 90

Usage client script

./client [-h] [-a] [-p] [-u]
 -h           show this help message and exit [optional]
 -a           IP address of the server [localhost if running on local machine] [required]
 -p           port number of the server [required]
 -u           username of the person [required]

Chatroom functionality

Command	Parameter	Desription
quit		Leave the chatroom
msg	"text"	send the msg to all online users (use"")
msg	"text" user	Send the msg to a particular user
online		get the username of all the users online
help		Show this help

Server

Each user is handled by a seperate thread in the server.The threads synchronise access to a global linked list storing the user information

Client

When the client connects to the server, it executes a chatroom shell. Each client has 2 running threads one for sending commands and other for receiving msgs, both working in sync with each other.

TO DO and Contributions

Feel free to contribute and collaborate

1. Making a testing environment to check for subtle synchronisation bugs
2. Resolving same user-name conflicts
3. adding feature to change user name
4. BUG-: When a user is typing and at the same moment receives a msg in the chatroom