Name

       checkbrack — check parenthesis and bracket count

Syntax

       checkbrack file...

Description

       Displays  each line of the file(s), together with their open bracket count that is reached
       at the end of line. Particularly, it allows you to find missing closing brackets. This  is
       especially helpful because the Perl interpreter for example has problems telling you where
       exactly something went wrong.

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

       hxtools(7)