Automatically discovering C dependencies

Question

I\'m required to write documentation for my current project that lists all .c files and for each one lists every .h file which is directly or indirectly included by that fil

Answer 1

What I do in my Makefile is

SRCS=$(wildcard *.c)

depend: $(SRCS)
    gcc -M $(CFLAGS) $(SRCS) >depend

include depend

This means that if any of the source files are updated, the depend rule will run, and use gcc -M to update the file called depend. This is then included in the makefile to provide the dependency rules for all the source files.

Make will check that a file is up to date before including it, so this depend rule will run if necessary whenever you run make without you needing to do a "make depend".

This will run any time any file has changed. I've never found this a problem, but if you had a huge number of files in the directory you might find it took too long, in which case you could try having one dependency file per source file, like this:

SRCS=$(wildcard *.c)
DEPS=$(SRCS:.c=.dep)

%.dep : %.c
    gcc -M $(CFLAGS) $< >$@

include $(DEPS)

Note that you can use -MM instead of -M to not include system headers.

Answer 2

An alternative to gcc -M is fastdep. Fastdep's author reports fastdep to be ten times faster than gcc's -M. If the project takes a while to build, fastdep may be worth a look.

Answer 3

Use SCons

$ scons --tree=all
scons: Reading SConscript files ...

scons: done reading SConscript files.
scons: Building targets ...
scons: `.' is up to date.
+-.
  +-SConstruct
  +-app
  | +-test.o
  | | +-test.c
  | | +-/include/PCI_1149_1.h
  | | +-/include/Pci.h
  | | +-/usr/bin/gcc
  | +-/usr/bin/gcc
  | +-/lib/libpci1149_64.a
  ...

Answer 4

"gcc -M file.c" does what you need.

Answer 5

In MSVC (2005 and 2008 at least, possibly other versions as well but not VC6) you can get the compiler to tell you all the files that were included during compilation. The output is quite verbose, but complete and fairly easy to parse with human eyes.

In Project Settings, go to the C/C++>Advanced tab, and toggle "Show Includes," then rebuild your project from the ground up.