How to install and use cscope

Cscope is a classic source code explorer that can be used to explore a directory containing C source and header files. It can also be applied on C++ files, but do not expect much intelligence on C++ features. It indexes the source files, just like ctags, but provides more useful ways to query the code. It provides a simple commandline interface to query the codebase. You might want to configure Vim to use cscope for a more user-friendly interface.

• Installing cscope is easy:

$ sudo apt install cscope

• To recursively scan and index all C source and header files in a directory and bring up the interface to explore it:

$ cscope -R

This will produce a cscope.out file which is where the symbol cross-references are stored. In the interface, you can look up symbols, definition of a symbol, all instances of a function call and even do find-replace. To exit the interface, press Ctrl-D.

• To only produce the cross-reference file:

$ cscope -R -b

• To request cscope to write cross-reference file to a different filename:

$ cscope -b -f .some_cscope_file

• To request cscope to index only files you want, list them in a namefile that is named cscope.files and invoke:

$ cscope -i -b

• To use a different namefile:

$ cscope -i some_namefile -b

• To be able to index C++ or CUDA files, we need to be able to list them out in a namefile. This can be done using the find command and we can ask cscope to use that namefile:

$ find -iregex '.*\.\(h\|hpp\|c\|cpp\|cu\)$' > .files_for_cscope
$ cscope -i .files_for_cscope -b

If you use these commands frequently, then wrap them up in a shell function for ease of use.

Tried with: Cscope 15.8b and Ubuntu 16.04