The
lint program checker has proven time and again to be one of the best tools for finding portability problems and certain types of coding errors in C programs. This book introduces you to
lint, guides you through running it on your programs, and helps you to interpret
lint's output.
lint verifies a program or program segments against standard libraries, checks the code for common portability errors, and tests the programming against some tried and true guidelines.
linting your code is a necessary (though not sufficient) step in writing clean, portable, effective programs. Contents include:
- Overview of using lint
- Dealing with lint' concerns: casting and delinting
- lint comments
- Using lint in detail: command line options, using lint with make, rolling your own lint library
- Public domain programs
- Under the hood: an inside look
- Future directions
Ian Darwin has worked in the computer industry for three decades, with Unix since 1980, with Java since 1995, and with OpenBSD since 1998. He wrote the freeware file(1) command used on Linux and BSD and is the author of Java Cookbook, as well as over seventy articles and several courses (both university and commercial) on C and Unix over the years. In addition to programming and consulting, Ian teaches Unix, C and Java for Learning Tree International, one of the world's largest technical training companies.