| cscope | |
| Latest Release Version: | 15.9 |
| Latest Release Date: | [1] |
| Operating System: | Unix, Linux, DOS |
| Genre: | Programming tool, for C, C++, Java |
| License: | BSD |
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.
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.
cscope is used in two phases. First, a developer builds the cscope database of the source code. The developer can often use [[Find (Unix)|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]