Question

Some time ago we took over the responsibility of a legacy code base.

One of the quirks of this very badly structured/written code was that
it contained a number of really huge structs, each containing
hundreds of members. One of the many steps that we did was to clean
out as much of the code as possible that wasn’t used, hence the need
to find unused structs/struct members.

Regarding the structs, I conjured up a combination of python, GNU
Global and ctags to list the struct members that are unused.

Basically, what I’m doing is to use ctags to generate a tags file,
the python-script below parses that file to locate all struct
members and then using GNU Global to do a lookup in the previously
generated global-database to see if that member is used in the code.

This approach have a number of quite serious flaws, but it sort of
solved the issue we faced and gave us a good start for further
cleanup.

There must be a better way to do this!

The question is: How to find unused structures and structure members
in a code base?

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os
import string
import sys
import operator

def printheader(word):
    """generate a nice header string"""
    print "\n%s\n%s" % (word, "-" * len(word))

class StructFreqAnalysis:
    """ add description"""
    def __init__(self):
        self.path2hfile=''
        self.name=''
        self.id=''
        self.members=[]

    def show(self):
        print 'path2hfile:',self.path2hfile
        print 'name:',self.name
        print 'members:',self.members
        print

    def sort(self):
        return sorted(self.members, key=operator.itemgetter(1))

    def prettyprint(self):
        '''display a sorted list'''
        print 'struct:',self.name
        print 'path:',self.path2hfile
        for i in self.sort():
            print '    ',i[0],':',i[1]
        print

f=open('tags','r')

x={} # struct_name -> class
y={} # internal tags id -> class

for i in f:
    i=i.strip()
    if 'typeref:struct:' in i:
        line=i.split()
        x[line[0]]=StructFreqAnalysis()
        x[line[0]].name=line[0]
        x[line[0]].path2hfile=line[1]
        for j in line:
            if 'typeref' in j:
                s=j.split(':')
                x[line[0]].id=s[-1]
                y[s[-1]]=x[line[0]]

f.seek(0)
for i in f:
    i=i.strip()
    if 'struct:' in i:
        items=i.split()
        name=items[0]
        id=items[-1].split(':')[-1]
        if id:
            if id in y:
                key=y[id]
                key.members.append([name,0])
f.close()

# do frequency count
for k,v in x.iteritems():
    for i in v.members:
        cmd='global -a -s %s'%i[0]     # -a absolute path. use global to give src-file for member
        g=os.popen(cmd)
        for gout in g:
            if '.c' in gout:
                gout=gout.strip()
                f=open(gout,'r')
                for line in f:
                    if '->'+i[0] in line or '.'+i[0] in line:
                        i[1]=i[1]+1
                f.close()

printheader('All structures')
for k,v in x.iteritems():
    v.prettyprint()

#show which structs that can be removed
printheader('These structs could perhaps be removed')
for k,v in x.iteritems():
    if len(v.members)==0:
        v.show()

printheader('Total number of probably unused members')
cnt=0
for k,v in x.iteritems():
    for i in v.members:
        if i[1]==0:
            cnt=cnt+1
print cnt

Edit

As proposed by @Jens-Gustedt using the compiler is a good way to do it. I’m after a approach that can do a sort of “High Level” filtering before using the compiler-approach.

Answer 1

If these are only a few struct and if the code does no bad hacks of accessing a struct through another type… then you could just comment out all the fields of your first struct and let the compiler tell you.

Uncomment one used field after the other until the compiler is satisfied. Then once that compiles, to a good testing to ensure the precondition that there were no hacks.

Iterate over all struct.

Definitively not pretty, but at the end you’d have at least one person who knows the code a bit.