Menu
Home Explore People Places Arts History Plants & Animals Science Life & Culture Technology
On this page
cscope
Free software that allows for searching source code written in C, C++, and Java

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.

Related Image Collections Add Image
Profiles
1 Image
We don't have any YouTube videos related to cscope yet.
We don't have any PDF documents related to cscope yet.
We don't have any Books related to cscope yet.
We don't have any archived web articles related to cscope yet.

History

Joe Steffen began writing cscope in 1980, as an aid to his programming word on a PDP-11.1 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.2

Derived software

  • KScope runs on KDE and integrates the Kate text editor. The KScope project is no longer being maintained.3
  • Seascope runs on PyQt4 and integrates the Scintilla text editor.4
  • Gscope is based on GTK2 and GTK3 and integrates with multiple text editors.5
  • CCTree is a native Vim plugin that integrates with the Vim editor and offers functions similar to KScope and Seascope.6
  • Csope is a fork with an altered TUI.7

See also

References

  1. "The History of Cscope". cscope.sourceforge.net. Retrieved 2023-09-06. https://cscope.sourceforge.net/history.html ↩

  2. CScope home page: "The fuzzy parser supports C, but is flexible enough to be useful for C++ and Java[...]" http://cscope.sourceforge.net/ ↩

  3. KScope homepage http://kscope.sourceforge.net/ ↩

  4. Seascope homepage https://code.google.com/p/seascope/ ↩

  5. Gscope homepage https://github.com/tefletch/gscope/wiki ↩

  6. "CCTree - C Call-Tree Explorer -- Cscope based source-code browser; code flow analyzer : Vim online". http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2368 ↩

  7. Csope homepage https://github.com/agvxov/csope ↩