NAME

       licensecheck - simple license checker for source files

SYNOPSIS

       licensecheck --help|--version

       licensecheck [--no-conf] [--verbose] [--copyright] [-l|--lines=N] [-i|--ignore=regex] [-c|--check=regex]
       [-m|--machine] [-r|--recursive] list of files and directories to check

DESCRIPTION

       licensecheck attempts to determine the license that applies to each file passed to it, by searching the
       start of the file for text belonging to various licenses.

       If any of the arguments passed are directories, licensecheck will add the files contained within to the
       list of files to process.

OPTIONS

       --verbose, --no-verbose
           Specify  whether  to  output the text being processed from each file before the corresponding license
           information.

           Default is to be quiet.

       -l=N, --lines=N
           Specify the number of lines of each file's header which should be  parsed  for  license  information.
           (Default is 60).

       -i=regex, --ignore=regex
           When  processing  the  list of files and directories, the regular expression specified by this option
           will be used to indicate those which should not be considered (e.g. backup files, VCS metadata).

       -r, --recursive
           Specify that the contents of directories should be added recursively.

       -c=regex, --check=regex
           Specify a pattern against which filenames will be matched in order to decide which files to check the
           license of.

           The default includes common source files.

       --copyright
           Also display copyright text found within the file

       -m, --machine
           Display    the    information    in    a    machine    readable    way,    i.e.    in    the     form
           <file><tab><license>[<tab><copyright>] so that it can be easily sorted and/or filtered, e.g. with the
           awk and sort commands.  Note that using the --verbose option will kill the readability.

       --no-conf, --noconf
           Do  not  read any configuration files. This can only be used as the first option given on the command
           line.

CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

       The two configuration files /etc/devscripts.conf and ~/.devscripts are sourced by a shell in  that  order
       to  set  configuration  variables.   Command  line  options  can  be  used to override configuration file
       settings.  Environment variable  settings  are  ignored  for  this  purpose.   The  currently  recognised
       variables are:

       LICENSECHECK_VERBOSE
           If  this  is  set to yes, then it is the same as the --verbose command line parameter being used. The
           default is no.

       LICENSECHECK_PARSELINES
           If this is set to a positive number then the specified number of lines at the start of each file will
           be read whilst attempting to determine the license(s) in use.  This  is  equivalent  to  the  --lines
           command line option.

LICENSE

       This  code  is  copyright  by Adam D. Barratt <adam@adam-barratt.org.uk>, all rights reserved; based on a
       script of the same name from the KDE SDK, which is copyright by  <dfaure@kde.org>.   This  program  comes
       with  ABSOLUTELY  NO WARRANTY.  You are free to redistribute this code under the terms of the GNU General
       Public License, version 2 or later.

AUTHOR

       Adam D. Barratt <adam@adam-barratt.org.uk>

Debian Utilities                                   2014-01-26                                    LICENSECHECK(1)