How to use cppclean to find unused headers

Question

I'm looking for a tool to help detect unnecessary header includes in a large c++ code base. The other stackoverflow questions on this topic all suggest cppclean. So I've installed cppclean and I'm trying to use it but even on trivially wrong examples it doesn't give any results.

For example, here's what I'm trying to clean. The source file:

// foo.cpp
#include "bar.h"

void main() { };

And the header file:

// bar.h
class bar {
};

And I run:

cppclean foo.cpp

But it prints nothing and returns 0.

Am I doing something wrong? Are there any tutorials anywhere on how to use this tool?

Answer 1

cppclean got updated in the meantime (June 2019) and includes now:

• Classes with virtual methods, no virtual destructor, and no bases

• Global/static data that are potential problems when using threads

• Functions that are declared but not defined

• Unnecessary forward class declarations

• Unnecessary function declarations

• Undeclared function definitions

• Unnecessary #includes in header files

  • No direct reference to anything in the header Header is unnecessary if classes were forward declared instead
  • Inconsistent case in #includes (foo.h versus Foo.h)

Still not available :

• (planned) Unnecessary #includes in source files

• (planned) Source files that reference headers not directly #included, ie, files that rely on a transitive #include from another header

• (planned) Unused members (private, protected, & public) methods and data

• (planned) using namespace std in header files

• (planned) Methods that are declared but not defined

As a conclusion :

cppclean .

should do the job now or alternatively :

cppclean <path>

Further Information and Source