cscope is a console mode or text-based graphical interface that allows software engineers or developers to search source code. It is often used on very large projects to find source code, functions, declarations, definitions and regular expressions given a text string.

The history of the tool goes back to the days of the PDP-11, however, it is still used by developers today who are accustomed to using the Vi editor or even developers who cannot get a hold of a graphical visual interface such as x-windows or windows and are forced to use a text based console to quickly find the information they need. Most of the functionality within cscope is available in modern graphical editors.

cscope is used in 2 phases. First a developer builds the cscope database. The developer can often use find or other unix tools to get the list of filenames that they need to index into a file called cscope.files. The developer then builds a database using the command cscope -b -q -k . Second, the developer can now search those files using the command cscope -d . Often an index needs to be rebuilt whenever changes are made to files.

cscope is often used to search content within c or c++ files, however, it can be used to search for content in other languages such as Java programming language, Python programming language, PHP and Perl.

cscope is free and available under a BSD License

The original developer of cscope is Joe Steffen

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