Automatically create and update cscope database

Proposed tip Please edit this page to improve it, or add your comments below (do not use the discussion page).

Please use new tips to discuss whether this page should be a permanent tip, or whether it should be merged to an existing tip.

created June 21, 2007 · complexity basic · author Zhaojun WU · version 7.0

---

In order to create or update the cscope database in current directory, the following key mapping would help a bit:

nmap <F11> :!find . -iname '*.c' -o -iname '*.cpp' -o -iname '*.h' -o -iname '*.hpp' > cscope.files ;
  \ cs kill -1<CR>:cs add cscope.out<CR>

In the above mapping, I use "find" to collect the C/C++ source code files and (re)create the cscope database; then "kill -1" to kill all cscope database connections and finally, the newly created "cscope.out" database is added by "cs add cscope.out".

There are two limitations in this key mapping:

1. the current directory should be the root path of the project
2. I don't know how to get the current cscope data connection number, so that I use "kill -1" to kill "all" cscope database connections, since actually I always only create one connections in one Vim instance. It is not practical if you are using multiple data connections in one vim instance.

Alternate version

Related to limitation #2 above, it's not actually necessary to kill the cscope connection. There is a command "cs reset" that can accomplish this purpose, if cscope.out is already selected as the cscope file. This gives the following variant:

nmap <F11> :!find . -iname '*.c' -o -iname '*.cpp' -o -iname '*.h' -o -iname '*.hpp' > cscope.files<CR>\
  :!cscope -b -f cscope.files -i cscope.out<CR>\
  :cs reset<CR>

Note that this assumes that there already exists a connection to the cscope.out file (which is the case if you tell Vim to automatically init the cscope connection at startup).

---