Cscope

Last updated
cscope
Stable release
15.9 / July 24, 2018;5 years ago (2018-07-24) [1]
Operating system Unix, Linux, DOS
Type Programming tool,
for C, C++, Java
License BSD
Website cscope.sourceforge.net   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

cscope is a programming tool which works in console mode, text-based interface, that allows computer programmers or software developers to search source code of the programming language C, with some support for C++ and Java. It is often used on very large projects to aid code comprehension to find source code, functions, declarations, definitions, and regular expression. cscope is free and released under a BSD license. The original developer of cscope is Joe Steffen.

Contents

History

Joe Steffen began writing cscope in 1980, as an aid to his programming word on a PDP-11. [2] The tool became very popular within Bell Labs, as fellow employees requested more features and improvements. The tool was later made part of the AT&T Unix distribution. It is still used by developers today, some of whom are most accustomed to using vi or other text-based editors, instead of GUI editors. The functions in cscope are available to varying degrees in modern graphical text editors.

Usage

cscope is used in two phases. First, a developer builds the cscope database of the source code. The developer can often use find or other Unix tools to get the list of filenames needed to index into a file called cscope.files. The developer then builds a database using the command cscope -b -q -k. The k flag is intended to build a database for an operating system or C library source code. It will not look in /usr/include. Second, the developer can now search those files using the command cscope -d. An index must be rebuilt whenever changes are made to indexed files.

cscope was created to search content within C code, but it can also be used (with some caveats) for C++ and Java code. [3]

Derived software

See also

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References

  1. Horman, Neil (24 July 2018). "update configure.in script for 15.9 release" . Retrieved 4 October 2018 via SourceForge.
  2. "The History of Cscope". cscope.sourceforge.net. Retrieved 2023-09-06.
  3. CScope home page: "The fuzzy parser supports C, but is flexible enough to be useful for C++ and Java[...]"
  4. KScope homepage
  5. Seascope homepage
  6. Gscope homepage
  7. "CCTree - C Call-Tree Explorer -- Cscope based source-code browser; code flow analyzer : Vim online".
  8. Csope homepage