Project File Dialog

The Project file dialog contains 4 tabs:

• Paths and defines; paths to check and basic preprocessor settings.
• Types and Functions; configuration of platform and 3rd party libraries
• Analysis; analysis options
• Warning options; formatting warnings, suppressing warnings, etc
• Addons; extra analysis with addons

Paths and defines

It is recommended to import a project file.

Import project

• What files to check
• Preprocessor defines
• Preprocessor include paths
• Language standard if set

Paths (If you do not import project)

What paths to check.

Defines (If you do not import project)

Cppcheck automatically checks the code with different preprocessor configurations.

#ifdef A
code1
#endif
#ifdef B
code2
#endif

Cppcheck will automatically perform analysis both when A is defined and B is defined. So any bugs in both code1 and code2 will be detected.

If you want to configure that A will always be defined in Cppcheck analysis you can do that here.

Defines are separated by semicolon. So you can for instance write:

A;B=3;C

Undefines (If you do not import project)

Cppcheck automatically checks the code with different preprocessor configurations.

#ifdef A
code1
#endif
#ifdef B
code2
#endif

Cppcheck will automatically perform analysis both when A is defined and B is defined. So any bugs in both code1 and code2 will be detected.

If you want to configure that A is never defined in Cppcheck analysis you can do that here.

Undefines are separated by semicolon. So you can for instance write:

A;C

Include paths (If you do not import project)

Specify include paths.

Types and Functions

Cppcheck uses the Platform setting to determine size of short/int/long/pointer/etc.

Check the libraries that you use in the Libraries listbox.

Analysis

Cppcheck build dir

This is a work-folder that Cppcheck uses. Each Cppcheck project should have a separate build dir. It is used for:

• whole program analysis
• debug output
• faster analysis (if a source file has changed check it, if source file is not changed then reuse old results)
• statistics

Parser

It is in general recommended to use Cppcheck parser. However you can choose to use Clang parser; Clang will be executed with a command line flag that tells it to dump its AST and Cppcheck will read that AST and convert it into a corresponding Cppcheck AST and use that.

Analysis

Configure what kind of analysis you want.

The Normal analysis is recommended for most use cases. Especially if you use Cppcheck in CI.

The Bug hunting can be used if you really want to find a bug in your code and can invest time looking at bad results and providing extra configuration.

Limit analysis

You can turn off checking of headers. That could be interesting if Cppcheck is very slow. But normally, you should check the code in headers.

It is possible to check the code in unused templates. However the Cppcheck AST will be incomplete/wrong. The recommendation is that you do not check unused templates to avoid wrong warnings. The templates will be checked properly when you do use them.

Max CTU depth: How deep should the whole program analysis be. The risk with a "too high" value is that Cppcheck will be slow.

Max recursion in template instantiation: Max recursion when Cppcheck instantiates templates. The risk with a "too high" value is that Cppcheck will be slow and can require much memory.

Warning options

Root path

The root path for warnings. Cppcheck will strip away this part of the path from warnings. For instance if there is a warning in

../myproject/foo/bar/file.cpp

../myproject/foo

bar/file.cpp

Warning Tags

Tags allow you to manually categorize warnings.

Exclude source files

Excluded source files will not be analyzed by Cppcheck.

Suppressions

List of suppressions. These warnings will not be shown.

Addons

Y2038
32-bit timers that count number of seconds since 1970 will overflow in year 2038. Check that the code does not use such timers.

Thread safety
Check that the code is thread safe

CERT
Ensure that the CERT coding standard is followed

MISRA
Ensure that the MISRA coding standard is followed. Please note you need to have a textfile with the misra rule texts to get proper warning messages. Cppcheck is not legally allowed to distribute the misra rule texts.

Clang-tidy
Run Clang-tidy