Analyzing your code with lint

Options and directives

lint is a static analyzer, which means that it cannot evaluate the run-time consequences of the dependencies it detects. Certain programs may contain hundreds of unreachable break statements, and lint will give a warning for each of them. The number of lint messages issued can be distracting. lint, however, provides command line options and directives to help suppress warnings you consider to be spurious.

NOTE: Directives are special comments embedded in the source text.

For the example we've cited here,

you can invoke lint with the -b option to suppress all complaints about unreachable break statements;
for a finer-grained control, you can precede any unreachable statement with the comment / NOTREACHED / to suppress the diagnostic for that statement.

The ``Usage'' section details options and directives and introduces the lint filter technique, which lets you tailor lint's behavior even more finely to your project's needs. It also shows you how to use lint libraries to check your program for compatibility with the library functions you have called in it.