Final answer:
To implement a multi threaded program to count words in a file based on their starting character, you can divide the file into chunks and assign each chunk to a separate thread using the P threads library.
Step-by-step explanation:
To implement a multi threaded program that can find how many words in a file begin with each character, you can divide the file into multiple chunks and assign each chunk to a separate thread. Each thread will count the number of words starting with a specific character using a shared counter variable.
Here is an example of how you can achieve this using the Pthreads library: Open the file and determine its size. Create an array of threads, where the number of threads is equal to the number of characters ('a' to 'z'). Create a shared counter variable to hold the total word count for each character. Divide the file into equal-sized chunks, ensuring that each chunk contains one or more complete words.
Assign each thread a specific range of characters (e.g., thread 1 counts words starting with 'a', thread 2 counts words starting with 'b', and so on). Each thread reads its assigned chunk of the file and counts the number of words starting with its assigned character. Each thread updates the shared counter variable with its word count. After all threads finish counting, the main thread sums up the word counts from the shared counter variable to get the total count for each character.