PCCRITIC(1)

💅 PCCRITIC 💅

okay so bestie, this is a page from the General Commands Manual — it's pccritic(1) and she is that girl. let's get into it 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

pccritic — a quality scorer for pkg-config files. yes she grades your metadata. yes she will clock you. 💀

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

pccritic [options] module-or-file ...

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so pccritic inspects pc(5) files and reports quality findings, and she gives each file a score from 0 to 100 plus a letter grade from A to F. she's built to be your interactive bestie while you're writing a package, and to be the vibe-check that runs in your continuous integration. double duty, main character energy. 👑

every command-line argument is a target. here's the rules, no cap:

• if the argument contains a slash or ends in .pc, it's interpreted as a path to a file
• otherwise it gets resolved as a module name from the search path, exactly the way pkgconf(1) would resolve it

and get this — a file that pkgconf(1) refuses to load because it omits a required field still gets scanned directly, so the most broken files of all can still be scored. she wants the mess. she wants the chaos. 🙈

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🌈 how the scoring works (the lore)

findings are classified by severity. your score starts at 100, and every finding subtracts a fixed penalty:

• critical finding → 25 off 😭
• major finding → 10 off
• minor finding → 4 off
• info finding → 1 off

the result gets clamped to the range 0 to 100. grades go like this:

• A → 90 and above ✨
• B → 80
• C → 70
• D → 60
• F → below 60 💀

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🧚 what the checks actually cover

the checks cover:

• required and recommended metadata
• version sanity
• relocatability of the libdir and includedir variables
• hygiene of the Cflags and Libs fields
• the Requires and Requires.private relationship
• basic file-formatting style

periodt. that's the whole checklist.

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🍓 the options, as follows

✨ OPTIONS ✨

• --about — prints the version number, the Copyright notice, and the license of the pccritic program to standard output, then exits. her lil business card. 🫶
• --version — prints just the version number of the pccritic program to standard output, then exits.
• --help — prints a short usage summary to standard output, then exits. for when you're lost, bestie, we've all been there.
• --quiet — prints only the score and grade for each target, one per line, instead of the full list of findings. lowkey mode. 🤫
• --min-score n — exits with a non-zero status if any target scores below n. this is the one you want for making a continuous-integration job fail when a file's quality regresses below a threshold. your CI guardrail, your ride or die. 🔥
• --color[=when] — controls colorized output. when may be auto (the default), always, or never. when it's auto, color is enabled only when standard output is a terminal and the NO_COLOR environment variable is not set. giving --color with no value at all is equivalent to always. slay.
• --define-variable=varname=value — defines varname as value. this affects how variables in the inspected file get expanded. 🧠

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💜 EXIT STATUS 💜

pccritic exits 0 on success. she exits non-zero if:

• a target could not be loaded
• the command line is invalid
• --min-score was given and a target scored below the threshold

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🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

score an installed module by name:

$ pccritic zlib

score a file before installation, and fail if it grades below a C:

$ pccritic --min-score 70 ./mylib.pc

summarize every file in a directory:

$ pccritic --quiet /usr/lib/pkgconfig/*.pc

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⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

pkgconf(1), pc(5)

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ngl bestie, run her on your .pc files before someone else does. your future self will thank you. 💖

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this page came from Debian, version dated June 28, 2026 — and that's the whole manual, we ate and left no crumbs. bye babe! 💅✨🦋🌸