Excluding Files

By default, CBI will process any file that it encounters in a compilation database (including #include files). The lines of code in these files will be included in the code divergence calculation unless:

• The file exists outside of the directory where codebasin is run.

• The file is explicitly excluded from the analysis.

Using the Analysis File

Files can be explicitly excluded from an analysis by adding an exclude key to the codebase section of the TOML file. Each entry in the exclude list is a pattern to match files against:

[codebase]
exclude = [
    "pattern",
    "pattern"
]

Note

Each pattern is a “pathspec”, matching the format used by git. For more information, see the git glossary.

For example, we can use this section to instruct CBI to ignore all files in the third-party/ subdirectory, allowing us to focus on our own code:

[codebase]
exclude = [
    "third-party/"
]

Using this new analysis file, the output of codebasin shows fewer lines shared between the cpu and gpu platforms:

 -----------------------
 Platform Set LOC % LOC
 -----------------------
           {}   2  7.41
        {cpu}   7 25.93
        {gpu}   7 25.93
   {cpu, gpu}  11 40.74
 -----------------------
 Code Divergence: 0.56
 Coverage (%): 92.59
 Avg. Coverage (%): 66.67
 Total SLOC: 27

Using the Command Line

It is also possible to exclude files directly from the command line, using the --exclude flag (or -x flag).

The flag expects exclude patterns to be specified the same way as the TOML file. To ignore all files in the third-party/ subdirectory as we did before, we can simply run:

$ codebasin -x "third-party/" analysis.toml

Tip

If a file should always be excluded, it’s better to specify that in the analysis file. The command line approach is best suited to evaluate “what if” scenarios, like “what if I excluded all files with a specific extension?” (e.g., -x "*.cu").