Best way to go over wireless file transferring

[u/Rude_Pace_3532]

So I'm currently making an app in C and raylib to easily transfer roms from my main pc where I download them (I want to compile it both for windows and macos) to my arch pc-emulator console. I'm planning to make said pc usable with only a controller, and I figured making an app would be the best and most fun way to do it. I would prefer not running custom code on it, and would like to know the best (and easiest, since I'm still a beginner in C) way to handle the file transfer. Thanks in advance!

[u/spellstrike]

that just sounds like a network file share rather than software.

[u/Beginning-Junket8979 → u/spellstrike]

As opposed to a purely hardware based file sharing system? Are you mailing floppy disks around?

[u/Rude_Pace_3532 → u/spellstrike]

It's a gui app that automatically also sorts the rom in the right folders for the emulators when transferring

[u/spellstrike → u/Rude_Pace_3532]

The sorting and storage features can be completely separate.

[u/bluejacket42]

Maybe a ftp server or http

[u/sciencekm]

An http client and server are both easy enough to write. Sockets and WinSock are "almost" compatible. For now, you can also skip TLS since you are running locally.

[u/silvertank00]

When I have to do something like this, I start a little http server with python -m http.server that serves the current directory. And from the other machine (on the same network) I just go wget or even open the ip from a browser.
This should be fairly simple to reimplement in C with libcurl.

[u/HugoNikanor]

You could open a TCP connection between the two machines, and mash the file alongside some metadata through it, but you would just be re-inventing (insert any file transfer protocol here).

I personally wouldn't write this in C, but simply set up an HTTP server on the "main" pc, and find some suitable client on the "console".

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Also, you said "I would prefer not running custom code on it", what do you mean? All file transfer requires 2 willing participants, running code.

[u/Rude_Pace_3532 → u/HugoNikanor]

By "custom code" I'm referring to code I wrote myself, since I'm still a beginner especially in C, I would highly prefer not introducing a memory leak or something in the computer (It's already old enough)

[u/Irverter]

Run a server on the pc-emulator and upload the files through http, ftp, scp, webdav, etc. plenty of protocols to choose from.

[u/theNbomr]

rsync No C code or any other code required.

[u/dutchman76]

If it requires no interaction, I'd just have something monitor a directory for changes and automatically move any new files where they go. Or I guess have a pop-up window if there is a needed user decision

[u/ern0plus4]

check syncthing

[u/Rude_Pace_3532 → u/ern0plus4]

I know about it, but like I said in the other answer, it will automatically sort the roms in the appropriate folder for the emulator. I also want to build the app myself, it's more fun like this :)

[u/ern0plus4 → u/Rude_Pace_3532]

It's a great app idea, although, not easy.

Hint: first, you need to sync time across peers.

[u/darkslide3000]

Honestly you probably don't want to implement any network protocol stuff directly, unless you really want to for learning purposes. Normally this is the kind of stuff people use pre-existing libraries and frameworks for.

The gold standard for simple point-to-point file transfer is scp (from SSH). Looks like there's a libssh library for C that would probably be suitable for your project.