use cppcheck without defining all the macros

Question

I use cppcheck on a project using the boost library. The headers in this library contain a huge amount of macro that I don't even use in my sources. Nevertheless, cppcheck explore paths depending on these macros that I think useless. Is there a way to tell cppcheck to ignore all macros unless it's defined in a source code using a #define?

Answer 1

Here is the the necessary part from cppcheck documentation:

-D<ID>               Define preprocessor symbol. Unless --max-configs or
                     --force is used, Cppcheck will only check the given
                     configuration when -D is used.
                     Example: '-DDEBUG=1 -D__cplusplus'.
-U<ID>               Undefine preprocessor symbol. Use -U to explicitly
                     hide certain #ifdef <ID> code paths from checking.
                     Example: '-UDEBUG'

You are able to define (-D) or undefine (-U) custom preprocesser symbols with these options.

Another option that is potentially interesting is

-f, --force          Force checking of all configurations in files. If used
                     together with '--max-configs=', the last option is the
                     one that is effective.

and

--max-configs=<limit>
                     Maximum number of configurations to check in a file
                     before skipping it. Default is '12'. If used together
                     with '--force', the last option is the one that is
                     effective.

This means the following:

cppcheck --force <PATH_TO_YOUR_CODE>

Cppcheck verifies all combinations of preprocessor paths, which could lead to long checking times on large code bases.

The corresponding documentation can be found here.

Answer 2

Not exactly what you want, but you can specify define to cppcheck so it evaluates only one branch:

see -D/-U options.