.TH LINT 1 "7 March 1983"
lint \- a C program verifier
attempts to detect features of the C program
likely to be bugs, or non-portable, or wasteful.
It also checks the type usage of the program more strictly
Among the things which are currently found are
loops not entered at the top,
automatic variables declared and not used,
and logical expressions whose value is constant.
Moreover, the usage of functions is checked to find
functions which return values in some places and not in others,
functions called with varying numbers of arguments,
and functions whose values are not used.
By default, it is assumed that all the
are to be loaded together; they are checked for
Function definitions for certain libraries are available to
these libraries are referred to by a
such as `\-lm', in the style of
are also treated as library files. To create lint libraries,
are the C sources of library
in the correct library format suitable for linting programs
Any number of the options in the following list
are also recognized as separate arguments.
Attempt to check portability to the
Apply a number of heuristic tests to attempt to
intuit bugs, improve style, and reduce waste.
statements that cannot be reached.
(This is not the default because, unfortunately,
outputs produce dozens of such comments.)
Suppress complaints about unused arguments in functions.
Report variables referred to by extern declarations,
Report assignments of long values to int variables.
Complain about casts which have questionable portability.
Do not complain about functions and variables used and not
defined, or defined and not used (this is suitable for running
on a subset of files out of a larger program).
Do not check compatibility against the standard library.
Do not complain about structures that are never defined (e.g.
using a structure pointer without knowing its contents.).
and other functions which do not return
are not understood; this causes various lies.
Certain conventional comments in the C source
will change the behavior of
stops comments about unreachable code.
the usual checking for variable numbers of arguments
in the following function declaration.
The data types of the first
shuts off strict type checking in the next expression.
option for the next function.
at the beginning of a file shuts off complaints about
unused functions in this file.
S.C. Johnson. Lint library construction implemented by Edward Wang.
.ta \w'/usr/lib/lint/llib-port.ln 'u
/usr/lib/lint/lint[12] programs
/usr/lib/lint/llib-lc.ln declarations for standard functions
/usr/lib/lint/llib-lc human readable version of above
/usr/lib/lint/llib-port.ln declarations for portable functions
/usr/lib/lint/llib-port human readable . . .
llib-l*.ln library created with
.I Lint, a C Program Checker
There are some things you just
get lint to shut up about.