Concurrency in C

Table of Contents

• About the Project
• Getting Started
  • Project Overview
  • Prerequisites
• Environment Setup
• Build and Run with Make
• Author

About the Project

This project is a multithreaded file compression and decompression program written in C. It uses POSIX threads (pthreads) to divide the work of compressing and decompressing a file among multiple threads, each of which handles a portion of the file independently. The compressed output is then written to a new file, and the decompressed output is written back to the original file.

Getting Started

Project Overview

The main components of the project are:

• file_t structure: Represents a file with its data and size.
• thread_t structure: Contains the arguments passed to each thread, including the data to be compressed or decompressed, the size of the data, and the output file name.
• compress function: The function that each thread runs to compress a segment of the input data and writes the compressed output to a buffer.
• decompress function: The function that each thread runs to decompress a segment of the input data and writes the decompressed output to a buffer.
• main function: Reads the input files, creates the threads, and writes the output.

Prerequisites

To build and run this project, you need:

• A Unix-like operating system
• The GCC compiler
• The pthreads library

Environment Setup

To compile the program, use the following commands:

gcc -o pzip pzip.c -lpthread
gcc -o punzip punzip.c -lpthread

To run the program, use the following command:

./pzip file1 [file2 ...]
./punzip file1 [file2 ...]

Replace file1 [file2 ...] with the names of the files you want to compress.

Build and Run with Make

If you are using a Linux environment, you can use make to build and run the project.

To build the project, use the following command:

make

To compress a file, use the following command:

make run-pzip

To decompress a file, use the following command:

make run-punzip

Author

Timothy Hwang