Name

       checkbrack — check parenthesis and bracket count

Syntax

       checkbrack [-p] 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.

Options

       -p     Enable Perl/PHP mode, that is, do not consider presence $(, $),  $[  and  $]  of  a
              bracket imbalance.

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)