Name

Syntax

Description

Options

-p

Enable Perl/PHP mode, that is, do not consider presence $(, $), $[ and $] of a bracket imbalance.

Example

$ checkbrack /usr/lib/hxtools/bin/checkbrack | less -S
#   () [] {}
13  0  0  1 foreach my $file (@ARGV) {
14  0  0  1     if (!-f $file) { next; }
15  0  0  1     print "Displaying $file...0;
16  0  0  2     if (!open(IN, "< $file")) {
17  0  0  2         print "Error opening $file: $!0;
18  0  0  2         next;
19  0  0  1     }

The numbers at the front are: line number, number of unclosed left parentheses, number of unclosed left square brackets and number of unclosed left square braces.

At the end of line 19, we would need to close one more brace to make it syntactically valid code.

The interesting thing of this, that if GCC, Perl or whatever outputs an error and you do not figure out what it means — that is often the case with missing braces — run checkbrack on the source file, skip to the end, and watch the brace counts.

Scroll up until the brace counts seem normal (i.e. 0 open braces) at outside any function.

See also