A small program to assist in solving hangman puzzles. This program can list all possible words (if any) and provide the frequency of each letter in the list possible words to provide the best guesses statistically.

For normal usage:

make

To remove compiled files:

make clean

Environment Variables:

• LLVM: compiles using clang and LLVM utilities when set to 1
• DEBUG: disables optimizations and includes debugging information when set to 1
• STATIC: statically links dependencies into the binary when set to 1

• make DEBUG=1
• make LLVM=1 STATIC=1

usage: ./hangman [-t worker-threads] [-f path_to_word_list] [-c]

-t worker_threads (optional) specifies the number of child processes used to search the dictionary. The default is 1.

-f path_to_word_list (optional) specifies the path to an alternative word list or dictionary. The default is /usr/share/dict/words

-c (optional) creates a cache if none exists or if used in conjunction with -t or -f, otherwise loads the word list from an existing cache (the cache determines the number of threads)

During usage CTRL-D can be used to exit at either the hangman string prompt or the wrong letters prompt.

For printing possible words, several constants can be altered in the file word_utilities.h to adjust the format, including:

• WILDCARD: the character used to determine an unknown letter
• PRINT_COL_LIMIT: how many characters can be printed per line
• PRINT_ROW_LIMIT: how many lines of words can be printed
• DELIM: the string of characters to put between each possible word

For other compile-time options that affect system usage, constants can be found in hangman.c.

• MAX_STRING_SIZE: the maximum number of characters in a word
• DEFAULT_WORKERS: the default number of child processes to use (must be >0)
• DEFAULT_DICTIONARY: the default path to the word list
• CACHE: the name of the cache file
• CACHE_PERM: the file permissions of the cache file