REUSE(1)

💖 REUSE(1) — reuse, bestie 💖

🌸 NAME 🌸

reuse — a tool for compliance with the REUSE recommendations. Periodt. 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

reuse [options] <command>

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

reuse is a helper tool for the REUSE initiative. Its main functionality in reuse-lint(1) is to verify whether a project is compliant with the REUSE Specification. It also contains an array of convenience functions to enable developers to become compliant.

For more information on how to use reuse beyond a reference of the command-line options, see the accompanying documentation or read it at https://reuse.readthedocs.io. For further information about REUSE, see https://reuse.software.

🎀 DETAILS 🎀

When searching for copyright and licensing tags inside of files, the tool does not strictly limit itself to the header comment as prescribed by the specification. It searches the entire file for REUSE information, whether in comments or not. This makes sure that the tool can parse any type of plain-text file, even if the comment style is not recognised.

The tool does not verify the correctness of copyright notices. If it finds any line containing '©', 'Copyright', or 'SPDX-FileCopyrightText:', then the tag and everything following it is considered a valid copyright notice, even if the copyright notice is not compliant with the specification.

💅 OPTIONS 💅

• --debug — Enable debug logging.
• --suppress-deprecation — Hide deprecation warnings.
• --include-submodules — Do not ignore Git submodules; they are treated as though they are part of the project. This is not strictly compliant with the specification.
• --include-meson-subprojects — Do not ignore Meson subprojects (i.e. the subprojects directory in the root of the project); they are treated as though they are part of the project. This is not strictly compliant with the specification.
• --no-multiprocessing — Disable multiprocessing performance enhancer. This may be useful when debugging.
• --root PATH — Set the root of the project to PATH. Normally this defaults to the root of the current working directory's VCS repository, or to the current working directory.
• --help — Display help and exit. If no command is provided, this option is implied.
• --version — Display the version and exit.

🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

reuse respects the following environment variables.

• REUSE_ENCODING_MODULE — Instead of automatically picking the best module to detect the encodings of files, reuse will use the module defined here. Its value must be python-magic, file-magic, charset_normalizer, or chardet.

👑 COMMANDS 👑

• reuse-annotate(1) — Add REUSE information to files.
• reuse-convert-dep5(1) — Convert .reuse/dep5 to REUSE.toml.
• reuse-download(1) — Download license files.
• reuse-lint(1) — Verify whether a project is compliant with the REUSE Specification.
• reuse-lint-file(1) — Verify whether individual files are compliant with the REUSE Specification.
• reuse-spdx(1) — Generate SPDX bill of materials.
• reuse-supported-licenses(1) — Print a list of supported licenses.

🫶 AUTHOR 🫶

Free Software Foundation Europe

💜 COPYRIGHT 💜

2026, Free Software Foundation Europe. CC-BY-SA-4.0

This page came from reuse version 6.2.0, dated Jul 16, 2026, for REUSE(1) — mwah, bestie 💋