CLANG-CHECK(1)

💖 NAME 💖

clang-check — bestie, this is the manual page for clang-check 21 ✨ (she lives in the User Commands section of your manual, iykyk)

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

Okay so here's the whole vibe — the usage goes like this:

USAGE: clang-check [options] <source0> [... <sourceN>]

And now, the OPTIONS 👑

🎀 Generic Options 🎀

These are the universal girlypops, available to everyone:

• --help — shows you all the available options (and if you want the secret extras, it's --help-hidden for more 📖)
• --help-list — prints out a list of all available options (--help-list-hidden for more 👀)
• --version — tells you which version of this program you're running, cute and simple 💅

🦋 clang-check options 🦋

The main character options, right this way:

• --analyze — runs the static analysis engine 🔍
• --analyzer-output-path=<string> — writes output to <file> 📝
• --ast-dump — builds ASTs and then debug-dumps them
• --ast-dump-filter=<string> — team up with -ast-dump or -ast-print and it will only dump/print the AST declaration nodes that have a certain substring in a qualified name. Wanna see all the filterable declaration node names? Use -ast-list for that 🌈
• --ast-list — builds ASTs and prints the list of declaration node qualified names 📜
• --ast-print — builds ASTs and then pretty-prints them, aesthetic ✨
• --extra-arg=<string> — an extra argument to append to the compiler command line
• --extra-arg-before=<string> — an extra argument to prepend to the compiler command line (she goes first, main character energy 👑)
• --fix-what-you-can — applies fix-it advice even when there are unfixable errors hanging around. She does what she can 🫶
• --fixit — applies fix-it advice to the input source
• -p <string> — build path 🏗️
• --syntax-tree-dump — dumps the syntax tree 🌳
• --tokens-dump — dumps the preprocessed tokens 🍓

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💜 About that -p <build-path> thing 💜

So -p <build-path> is what you use to read a compile command database, no cap.

For example — it can be a CMake build directory where a file called compile_commands.json exists. (Pro tip from the manpage itself: use the -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON CMake option to get that output.) And when you don't specify a build path at all, it goes on a little quest 🔎 — it searches for compile_commands.json through all parent paths of the first input file. For an example of setting up Clang Tooling on a source tree, see:

https://clang.llvm.org/docs/HowToSetupToolingForLLVM.html

🧚 About <source0> ... 🧚

<source0> ... is where you specify the paths of your source files. These paths get looked up in the compile command database. Here's the tea ☕:

• If the path of a file is absolute, it needs to point into CMake's source tree.
• If the path is relative, then the current working directory needs to be in the CMake source tree, and the file must be in a subdirectory of the current working directory.
• Any "./" prefixes in the relative files get automatically removed — but the rest of a relative path has to be a suffix of a path in the compile command database. Respect the rules bestie 🌸

For example, to run clang-check on all the files in a subtree of the source tree, you'd do:

find path/in/subtree -name '*.cpp'|xargs clang-check

Or, if you're using a specific build path:

find path/in/subtree -name '*.cpp'|xargs clang-check -p build/path

Heads up 💀 — path/in/subtree and the current directory both need to follow all those rules we just described above. Don't skip that part, fr fr.

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Okay that's literally the whole page, slay 💅💖 thanks for reading, now go run clang-check on something and feel iconic.

✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: This was clang-check 21, from September 2026 — manual page CLANG-CHECK(1) ✨🦋🌸 :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧