Lint

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 F. Darwin has worked in the computer industry for three decades. He wrote the freeware file(1) command used on Linux and BSD and is the author of Checking C Programs with Lint, Java Cookbook, and over seventy articles and courses on C and Unix. 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.