1LINT(1)                     General Commands Manual                    LINT(1)
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NAME

6       lint - a C program verifier
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SYNOPSIS

9       lint [ -abchnpuvx ] file ...
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DESCRIPTION

12       Lint  attempts  to  detect  features  of  the C program files which are
13       likely to be bugs, or non-portable, or wasteful.  It  also  checks  the
14       type  usage of the program more strictly than the compilers.  Among the
15       things which are currently found are unreachable statements, loops  not
16       entered at the top, automatic variables declared and not used, and log‐
17       ical expressions whose value is constant.  Moreover, the usage of func‐
18       tions  is  checked to find functions which return values in some places
19       and not in others, functions called with varying numbers of  arguments,
20       and functions whose values are not used.
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22       By default, it is assumed that all the files are to be loaded together;
23       they are checked for mutual compatibility.   Function  definitions  for
24       certain  libraries  are available to lint; these libraries are referred
25       to by a conventional name, such as `-lm', in the style of ld(1).
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27       Any number of the options in the following list may be used.   The  -D,
28       -U, and -I options of cc(1) are also recognized as separate arguments.
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30       p      Attempt to check portability to the IBM and GCOS dialects of C.
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32       h      Apply  a  number  of  heuristic tests to attempt to intuit bugs,
33              improve style, and reduce waste.
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35       b      Report break statements that cannot be reached.   (This  is  not
36              the  default because, unfortunately, most lex and many yacc out‐
37              puts produce dozens of such comments.)
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39       v      Suppress complaints about unused arguments in functions.
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41       x      Report variables referred to by extern declarations,  but  never
42              used.
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44       a      Report assignments of long values to int variables.
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46       c      Complain about casts which have questionable portability.
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48       u      Do  not  complain  about  functions  and  variables used and not
49              defined, or defined and not used (this is suitable  for  running
50              lint on a subset of files out of a larger program).
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52       n      Do not check compatibility against the standard library.
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54       Exit(2)  and  other  functions  which do not return are not understood;
55       this causes various lies.
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57       Certain conventional comments in the C source will change the  behavior
58       of lint:
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60       /*NOTREACHED*/
61              at appropriate points stops comments about unreachable code.
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63       /*VARARGSn*/
64              suppresses  the usual checking for variable numbers of arguments
65              in the following function declaration.  The data  types  of  the
66              first n arguments are checked; a missing n is taken to be 0.
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68       /*NOSTRICT*/
69              shuts off strict type checking in the next expression.
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71       /*ARGSUSED*/
72              turns on the -v option for the next function.
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74       /*LINTLIBRARY*/
75              at  the  beginning  of  a file shuts off complaints about unused
76              functions in this file.
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FILES

79       /usr/lib/lint[12] programs
80       /usr/lib/llib-lc declarations for standard functions
81       /usr/lib/llib-port declarations for portable functions
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SEE ALSO

84       cc(1)
85       S. C. Johnson, Lint, a C Program Checker
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