Over the past months I have been using static code analysis tools such as smatch and Coverity Scan on various open source projects that I am involved with. These, combined with using gcc's -Wall -Wextra have proved useful in tracking down and eliminating various bugs.
Recently I stumbled on cppcheck and gave it a spin on several larger projects. One of the cppcheck project aims is to find errors that the compiler won't spot and also try to keep the number of false positives found to a minimum.
cppcheck is very easy to use, the default settings just work out of the box. However, for extra checking I enabled the --force option to check of all configurations and the --enable=all to report on checks to be totally thorough and pedantic.
The --enable option is especially useful. It allows one to select different types of checking, for example, coding style, execution performance, portability, unused functions and missing include files.
Even though my code has been through smatch and Coverity Scan, cppcheck still managed to find a few issues using --enable=all
1. unused functions
2. a potential memory leak with realloc(), for example:
buf = realloc(buf, new_size);
if (!buf)
return NULL;
if realloc() fails, buf can be leaked. A potential fix is:
tmp = realloc(buf, new_size);
if (!tmp) {
free(buf);
return NULL;
} else
buf = tmp;
3. some potential sscanf buffer overflows
4. some coding style improvements, for example, local auto variables could be moved to a deeper scope
So cppcheck worked well for me. I recommend referring to the cppcheck project wiki to check out the features and then subjecting your code to it and seeing if it can find any bugs.