Generic File Queries

A generic file query is a powerful mechanism for locating files that match the criteria you specify. All the ready-made file queries that CScout provides you are just URLs specifying saved instances of generic queries.

You specify the query through the following form:

File Query

Writable
Read-only

Sort-by	Metric	Compare	Value
	Number of characters
	Number of comment characters
	Number of space characters
	Number of line comments
	Number of block comments
	Number of lines
	Maximum number of characters in a line
	Number of character strings
	Number of unprocessed lines
	Number of C preprocessor directives
	Number of processed C preprocessor conditionals (ifdef, if, elif)
	Number of defined C preprocessor function-like macros
	Number of defined C preprocessor object-like macros
	Number of preprocessed tokens
	Number of compiled tokens
	Number of copies of the file
	Number of statements
	Number of defined project-scope functions
	Number of defined file-scope (static) functions
	Number of defined project-scope variables
	Number of defined file-scope (static) variables
	Number of complete aggregate (struct/union) declarations
	Number of declared aggregate (struct/union) members
	Number of complete enumeration declarations
	Number of declared enumeration elements
	Number of directly included files
	Entity name

Reverse sort order

Match any of the above Match all of the above

File names should ( not) match RE

Query title

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CScout

You start by specifying whether the file should be writable (i.e. typically part of your application) and/or readable (i.e. typically part of the compiler or system). Next come a series of metrics CScout collects for each file. For each metric (e.g. the number of comments) you can specify an operator ==, !=, < or > and a number to match that metric against. Thus to locate files without any comments you would specify
Number of block comments == 0.

On the left of each metric you can specify whether that metric will be used to sort the resulting file list. In that case, the corresponding number will appear together with each file listed. A separate option allows you to specify that files should be sorted in the reverse order.

You can request to see files matching any of your specifications (Match any of the above) or to see files matching all your specifications (Match all of the above).

Sometimes you may only want to search in a subset of files; you can then specify a regular expression that filenames should match (or not match) against: "File names should (not) match RE".

Finally, you can also specify a title for your query. The title will then appear on the result document annotating the results, and will also provide you with a sensible name when creating a bookmark to it.