Notes on PC-lint

A few notes about Gimpel PC-lint

Running PC-lint with GCC under Cygwin

I had reasonable success using PC-lint under Cygwin 1.5.x with GCC 3.3.1. Here are some configuration files to make it work.

In directory "C:\lint":

• file std.lnt

  //  Gnu C/C++, -si4 -sp4,
  //  Standard lint options
  co-cygwin.lnt
  options.lnt  -si4 -sp4
  

• file options.lnt (to get emacs parsable error messages)

  // emacs style
  -"format=%(%f:%l:%c: %)%t %n: %m"
  

• file co-cygwin.lnt

  Starting from the file co-gnu3.lnt available on the Gimpel web site, the file must be modified to add most variables pre-defined by GCC (use gcc -E -dM -xc /dev/null). Then various oddities crop up such as disabling some MS reserved keywords, adding some GCC builtins, etc.

  The option -cgnu imports the symbols declared in the std namespace in the global namespace. If not suitable, it needs to be commented out.

• A few more quirks:
  • Windows file names are case insensitive and, thus, "xxx.C" will be understood as a C file.
  • PC-lint does not understand Cygwin symbolic links.
  • "\" needs to be escaped under Cygwin (e.g. use "\\").

Use with "make"

The following scheme works reasonably well. Put project specific options in the file my_project.lnt. Each ".cpp" produces a ".lob" ("lint object") (-u: unit checking, -zero: return zero as error code, -oo: produce a "lob" file). All ".lob" files can be process together to cross check the modules.

LINT = C:\\lint\\lint-nt -iC:\\lint std.lnt
LINTFLAGS = my_project.lnt
MODFLAGS = -u -zero -oo\($@\)

OBJECTS = xxx.lob

project: $(OBJECTS)
        $(LINT) $(LINTFLAGS) $(OBJECTS)

xxx.lob: xxx.cpp
        $(LINT) $(LINTFLAGS) $(MODFLAGS) xxx.cpp

Alternatively, the project can processed in one go by providing all source files to the command line. It scales surprisingly well.

Sorting the messages

This simple script provides a sorted list of messages.

PC-lint with wine on linux

Until Gimpel software fixes this, do be aware that PC-lint runs just fine on Linux as a regular console application and works just fine on G++ code.

LINT-NT.EXE only imports 57 symbols from KERNEL32.DLL, all of which are flawlessly implemented in Wine. There is no performance difference when running it this way.

Simply install Wine (http://www.winehq.com/), then just type:

$wine lint-nt.exe [parameters]

Or, if you add the appropriate line to "/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register", you can just type:

$lint-nt.exe [parameters]

For more details on running Win32 console apps under Linux with Wine, see:

http://www.winehq.com/site/docs/wine-user/cui-programs

See /usr/src/linux/Documentation/binfmt_misc.txt for more info about binfmt_misc.

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